Religion And The Rise Of Capitalism Capitalism A Historical Study

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Religion and the rise of capitalisn

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RELIGION AND
THE RISE OF
CAPITALISM

A HISTORICAL STUDY

(Holland Memorial Lectures, 1922)

by R. H. TAWNEY

Reader in Economic History , University of London;
Sometime Fellow of Itatliol College, Oxford

A MENTOR BOOK

Published by THE NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY

TO

DR. CHARLES GORE

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COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY
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COPYRIGHT, 1954, BY R H TAWNEY

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Contents

INTRODUCTION 1

PREFACE TO 1937 EDITION 3

I. THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 11

The Social Organism 20

The Sin of Avarice 39

The Ideal and the Reality 54

II. THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 61

The Economic Revolution 62

Luther 72

Calvin 91

III. THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 116

The Land Question 118

Religious Theory and Social Policy 128

The Growth of Individualism 149

IV. THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 164

Puritanism and Society 165

A Godly Discipline Versus the Religion of

Trade 176

The Triumph of the Economic Virtues 189

The New Medicine for Poverty 210

V. CONCLUSION 227

NOTES 237

INDEX 71 {£3381 27

PITY rwifi Y?nw in i

ic Whatever the world thinks, he who hath not
much meditated upon God, the human mind and
the summum bonum, may possibly make a thriv-
ing earthworm, but will most indubitably make
a sorry patriot and a sorry statesman "

BISHOP BERKELEY, Sins, 350

Introduction

TH# object of this book is to trace some strands in the de-
velopment Of Religious thoughlfon gollal and ^ eCojii^jOTTr-^rtr^S"
ttons in the period which saw the transition irorn medieval
tP^niudeui theories of social organization. "TTcrnes Tia^Tcarrv
trie subject Jjevtmg^j^

tury. and it makes no pretense of dealing with the history
either of economic theory or of economic practice, except in
so far as theory and practice were related to changes in re-
ligious opinion. In reality, however, the connection be-
tween them was intimate and vital The revolutions, at
once religious, political and social, which "herald tne transi-
tion from the medieval to the mod errPworld, were hardly
less Derisive foj the economic character ot tlie new civiliza-
tion than for its ecclesiastical organization and religious
^ortrinfrs -Trip pronomir rafe^ories of modern .society have
their roots in the economic expansion and social convulsions
which accompanied the age of the Renaissance and the Re-
formation""

The history of religious thought on questions of social
ethics is a topic which has been treated in England by the
late Dr Cunningham, by Sir William Ashley, whose essay
on The Canonist Doctrine first interested me in the subject,
by Mr G G Coulton, Mr. H G. Wood, and Mr. G.
O'Brien But it is no reflection on their work to say that
the most important contributions of recent years have come
from continental students, in particular Troeltsch, Choisy,
Sombart, Brentano, Levy and, above all, Max Weber, whose
celebrated essay on Die Protestantische Ethik und der Geist
des Kapitalismus gave a new turn to the discussion. No
one can work, on however humble a scale, in the same field,
without being conscious of the heavy obligation under which
these scholars have laid him While I have not always been
able to accept their conclusions, T am glad to have this op-
portunity of expressing my indebtedness to them. I regret
that Mr. Coulton 's The Medieval Village appeared too late
for me to make use of its abundant stores of learning and
insight.

It only remains for me to thank the friends whose as-
sistance has enabled me to make this book somewhat less

2 INTRODUCTION

imperfect than it would otherwise have been. Mr J L.
Hammond, Dr. E. Power, and Mr. A P Wadsworth have
been kind enough to read, and to impiove, the manuscript.
Professor J. E Neale, in addition to reading the proofs,
has helped me most generously throughout with advice and
criticism. I am deeply indebted both to Miss Bulkley, who
has undertaken the thankless task of correcting the proofs
and making an index, and to the London School of Eco-
nomics and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund
for enabling me to make use of her services. My obligation
to the help given by my wife is beyond acknowledgment

R. H. TAWNEY.

Prejace to IQ3? Edition

SINCE the appearance of this book ten years ago, the litera-
ture on its subject has considerably increased The learned
work of Troeltsch, the best introduction to the historical
study of religious thought on social issues, can now be read
in an English translation, as can also the articles of Weber
on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The
omission from my book of any reference to post -Reforma-
tion Catholic opinion was a serious defect, which subsequent
writers have done something to repair The development
of economic thought in mediaeval Italy, the social forces at
work in the Germany of Luther, and his attitude to them;
the economic doctrines of Calvin, the teaching of the Jesuits
on usury and allied topics, English social policy during the
Interregnum, the religious and social outlook of the French
bouigcoisic of the same period; the attitude of Quakers,
VVesleyans, and other bodies of English Nonconformists to
the chancing economic world which confronted them in the
eighteenth century, have all had books devoted to them In
the somewhat lengthy list of articles on these and kindred
subjects, those by the late Professor See, M Halbwachs,
and Mr Parsons, and an article by Mr Gordon Walker
which has just appeared in The Economic History Review,
specially deserve attention x

It will be seen, therefore, that the problems tieated in the
following pages, if they continue to perplex, have not ceased
to arouse interest What conclusions, if any, emerge from
the discussion?

The most significant are truisms When this book first
appeared, it was possible for a friendly reviewer, writing in
a serious journal, to deprecate in all gravity the employment
of the term "Capitalism" in an historical work, as a political
catch-word, betraying a sinister intention on the part of the
misguided author. An innocent solecism of the kind would
not, it is probable, occur so readily today Obviously, the
word "Capitalism," like "Feudalism" and "Meicantilism,"
is open to misuse Obviously, the time has now come when
it is more important to determine the different species of
Capitalism, and the successive phases of its growth, than to
continue to labour the existence of the genus. But, after

3

4 PREFACE TO 1937 EDITION

more than half a century of work on the subject by scholars
of half a dozen different nationalities and of every variety
of political opinion, to deny that the phenomenon exists, or
to suggest that, if it does exist, it is unique among human
institutions, in having, like Melchizedek, existed from eter-
nity; or to imply that, if it has a history, propriety forbids
that history to be disinterred, is to run willully in blinkers
Verbal controversies are profitless; if an author discovers a
more suitable term, by all means let him use it He is un-
likely, however, to make much of the history of Europe
during the last three centuries, if, in addition to eschewing
the word, he ignores the fact

The more general realization of the role of Capitalism in
history has been accompanied by a second change, which, if
equally commonplace, has also, perhaps, its significance.
"Trade is one thing, religion is another": once advanced as
an audacious novelty, the doctrine that religion and eco-
nomic interests form two separate and co-ordinate king-
doms, of which neither, without presumption, can encroach
on the other, was commonly accepted by the England of the
nineteenth century with an unquestioning assurance at which
its earliest exponents would have felt some embarrassment
An historian is concerned less to appraise the validity of an
idea than to understand its development The effects for
good or evil of that convenient demarcation, and the forces
which, in our own day, have caused the boundary to shift,
need not here be discussed. Whatever its merits, its victory,
it is now realized, was long in being won The economic
theories propounded by Schoolmen, the fulminations by the
left wing of the Reformers against usury, landgrabbing, and
extortionate prices; the appeal of hard-headed Tudor states-
men to traditional religious sanctions, the attempt of Calvin
and his followers to establish an economic discipline more
rigorous than that which they had overthrown, are bad evi-
dence for practice, but good evidence for thought All rest
on the assumption that the institution of property, the trans-
actions of the market-place, the whole fabric of society and
the whole range of its activities, stand by no absolute title,
but must justify themselves at the bar of religion. All in-
sist that Christianity has no more deadly foe than the ap-
petitus divitiarum infinites, the unbridled indulgence of the
acquisitive appetite. Hence the claim that religion should

PREFACE TO 1937 EDITION 5

keep its hands off business encountered, when first formu-
lated, a great body of antithetic doctrine, embodied not only
in literature and teaching, but in custom and law. It was
only gradually, and after a warfare not confined to paper,
that it affected the transition from the status of an odious
paradox to that of an unquestioned truth

The tendency of that transition is no longer in dispute.
Its causation and stages remain the subject of debate. The
critical period, especially in England, was the two centuries
following the Reformation. It is natuFal, therefore, IhaT
most recent work on the subject of this book should have
turned its high lights on that distracted age. The most
striking attempt to formulate a theory of the movement of
religious thought on social issues which then took place was
made at the beginning of the present century by a German
scholar, Max Weber, J in two articles published in 1904 and
1905. Hence it is not less natural that much of that work
should, consciously or unconsciously, have had Weber as
its starting point

WThat exactly was the subject with which he was con-
cerned? That question is obviously the first which should
be asked, though not all his critics ask it. He was prepar-
ing to undertake the comparative study of the social out-
look and influence of different religions, the incomplete
results of which appeared in three volumes in 1920, under
the name of Gcsawmclte Aujiatzc zur Religtonssoztologie.
The articles, Die protestantischc Ethik und Geist dcs Kap-
italismus, were a first step towards that larger work, and
subsequently, corrected and amplified, formed part of its
first volume Weber thought that western Christianity as a
whole, and in particular certain varieties of it, which ac-
quired an independent life as a result of the Reformation,
had been more favorable to the progress of Capitalism
than some other great creeds His articles were an attempt
to test that geneialization

Their scope is explained in an introduction written later
to the Rtligwnssoziologie His object was to examine — the
abstractions fall with a mournful thud on English ears — •
"the influence of certain religious ideas on the development
of an economic spirit or the ethos of an economic system."
He hoped — O sancta simplicitas! — to avoid misunderstand-
ing by underlining somewhat heavily the limitations of his

6 PREFACE TO 1937 EDITION

theme. He formulated no "dogma"; on the contrary, he
emphasized that his articles were to be regarded as merely a
Vorarbeit* a preparatory essay. He did not seek "a psy-
chological determination of economic events",4 on the con-
trary, he insisted on "the fundamental importance of the
economic f actor. "r> He did not profess to offer a complete
interpretation even of the religious attitude discussed in his
articles; on the contrary, he urged the necessity of investi-
gating how that attitude itself tlwas in turn influenced in its
development and character by the totality of social condi-
tions, especially the economic ones "<( So far from desiring
— to quote his own words — "to substitute for a one-sided
'materialistic' an equally one-sided 'spiritual1 interpretation
of civilization and history,"7 he expressly repudiated any
intention of the kind.

In view of these disclaimers, it should not be necessary
to point out that Weber made no attempt in the articles in
question to advance a comprehensive theory of the genesis
and growth of Capitalism That topic had been much dis-
cussed in Germany since Marx opened the debate, and the
first edition of the most massive of recent books on the
subject, Sombart's Dcr Modcrnc Kapttalismus, had ap-
peared two years before. The range of Weber's interests,
and the sweep of his intellectual vision, were, no doubt,
unusually wide; but his earliest work had been done on eco-
nomic history, and he continued to lecture on that subject
till his death in 1920 If he did not in his articles refer to
the economic consequences of the discovery of America, or
of the great depreciation, or of the rise to financial pre-emi-
nence of the Catholic city of Antwerp, it was not that these
bashful events had at last hit on an historian whose notice
they could elude. Obviously, they were epoch-making; obvi-
ously, they had a profound effect, not only on economic
organization, but on economic thought. Weber's immediate
problem, however, was a different one. Montesquieu re-
marked, with perhaps excessive optimism, that the English
"had progressed furthest of all people in three important
things, piety, commerce and freedom." The debt of the third
of these admirable attributes to the first had often been
emphasized. WTas it possible, Weber asked, that the sec-
ond might also owe something to it? He answered that
question in the affirmative. The connecting link was to be

PREFACE TO 1937 EDITION 7

found, he thought, in the influence of the religious move-
ment whose greatest figure had been Calvin.

Since Weber's articles are now available in English, it is
needless to recapitulate the steps in his argument. My own
views upon it, if 1 may refer to them without undue ego-
tism, were summarized in a note — too lengthy to be read —
to the first edition of the present work, and were later re-
stated more fully in the introduction to the English trans-
lation of the articles which appeared in 1930.s Weber's
generalizations had been widely discussed by continental
scholars for more than twenty years before this book ap-
peared The criticisms contained in it, therefore, had no
claim to originality — unless, indeed, to be less anxious to
refute an author than to understand him is in itself to be
original.

The first of them — that uthe development of Capitalism
in Holland and England in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries was due, not to the fact that they were Protestant
Powers, but to large economic movements, in particular the
Discoveries and the results which flowed from them" — has
since been developed at some length by Mr. Robertson; but
it was not, perhaps, quite just. Weber would have replied,
no doubt, that such a remark, however true, was as far as
his articles were concerned, an ignoratio elenchi. To meet
him fairly, he would have said, one should meet him on his
own ground, which at the moment was that, not of general
economic history, but of religious thought on social issues.
My second comment, already made by Brentano — that more
weight should have been given to the political thought of
the Renaissance — had been anticipated by Weber,4 and I
regret that I overlooked his observations on that point. His
gravest weaknesses in his own special field, where alone
criticism is relevant, are not those on which most emphasis
has usually been laid The Calvinist applications of the
doctrine of the "Calling" have, doubtless, their significance;
but the degree of influence which they exercised, and their
affinity or contrast with other versions of the same idea, are
matters of personal judgment, not of precise proof. Both
Weber and his critics have made too much of them, as I did
myself. His account of the social theory of Calvinism,
however, if it rightly underlined some points needing em-
phasis, left a good deal unsaid. The lacunae in his argu-

8 PREFACE TO 1937 EDITION

ment cannot here be discussed, but two of them deserve no-
tice. Though some recent attempts to find parallels to that
theory in contemporary Catholic writers have not been very
happy, Weber tended to treat it as more unique than it was.10
More important, he exaggerated its stability and consist-
ency. Taking a good deal of his evidence from a somewhat
late phase in the history of the movement, he did not em-
phasize sufficiently the profound changes through which
Calvinism passed in the century following the death of
Calvin.

The last point is of some moment It suggests that the
problem discussed by Weber requires to be restated. It is
natural, no doubt, that much of the later work on the sub-
ject should have taken him for its target, and probably in-
evitable— such is the nature of controversy — that a theory
which he advanced as a hypothesis to explain one range of
phenomena, and one alone, should have been clothed for the
purpose of criticism with the uncompromising finality of a
remorseless dogma. His mine has paid handsome dividends,
but, whatever its attractions, that vein, it may be suggested,
is now worked out The important question, after all, is
not what Weber wrote about the facts, still less what the
epigoni who take in his washing have suggested that he
wrote, but what the facts were It is an illusion to suppose
that he stands alone in pointing to a connection between the
religious movements of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies and the outburst of economic energy which was re-
making society in the Netherlands and 'England Other
students have reached, independently of him, that not re-
condite conclusion11 How much truth does it contain?

To attempt a reply to that question would expand a pref-
ace into a book The materials for answering it are, how-
ever, abundant. If contemporary opinion on the point is
not easily cited, the difficulty arises, not from lack of evi-
dence to reveal it, but from the embarras dc richessc which
it offers for quotation Its tenor is not doubtful. The truth
is that the ascription to different confessions of distinctive
economic attitudes was not exceptional in the seventeenth
century; among writers who handled such topics it was
almost common form. It occurs repeatedly in works of
religious controversy. It occurs also in books, such as those
of Temple, Petty, and Defoe, and numerous pamphlets,

PREFACE TO 1937 EDITION 9

by men whose primary interest was, not religion, but eco-
nomic affairs So far, in fact, from being, as has been sug-
gested12 with disarming naivete, the sinister concoction of
a dark modern conspiracy, designed to confound Calvinism
and Capitalism, godly Geneva and industrious Manchester,
in a common ruin, the existence of a connection between
economic Radicalism and religious Radicalism was to those
who saw both at first-hand something not far from a
platitude Until some reason is produced for rejecting their
testimony, it had better be assumed that they knew what
they were talking about.

How precisely that connection should be conceived is, of
course, a different question It had, obviously, two sides.
Religion influenced, to a degree which to-day is difficult to
appreciate, men's outlook on society. Economic and social
changes acted powerfully on religion. Weber, as was natural
in view of his special interests, emphasized the first point.
He did so with a wealth of knowledge and an intellectual
force which deserve admiration, and not least the admira-
tion of those who, like myself, have ventured to dissent
from some of his conclusions. He touched the second
point only en passant. There is truth in the criticism of Mr.
Gordon Walker that Weber did not inquire how far the
Reformation was a response to social needs, or investigate
the causes, as well as the consequences, of the religious
mentality which he analysed with so much insight

It is that aspect of the subject which most needs work
to-day. In the triple reconstruction, political, ecclesiastical,
and economic, through which England passed between the
Armada and the Revolution, every ingredient in the caldron
worked a subtle change in every other. There was action
and reaction "L/esprit calviniste," and 'Tespnt des hommes
nouveaux que la revolution economique du temps introduit
dans la vie des affaires/7 13 if in theory distinct, were in
practice intertwined Puritanism helned to mould the social
order, but it was also itself increasingly moulded by it. Of
the influence of the economic expansion of the age on Eng-
lish religious thought something is said in the following
pages. I hope that their inadequacies may prompt some
more competent writer to deal with that subject as its im-
portance deserves.

R. H. TAWNEY

CHAPTER I

The Medieval Background

"La misencorde de Dieu est infinie : elle sauvera meme un riche.**
ANATOLE FRANCE, Le Puili de Sainte Claire.

UQ\JE pourrions-nous gagner," once wrote a celebrated
economist, "a recueillir des opinions absurdes, des doctrines
decriees, et qui meritent de Fetre? II serait a la fois inutile
et fastidieux de les exhumer."1 One who ^studies the de-
yelopment of social theory can hardly hope to avoid tne
criticism whic"h lg brought against those who disturb the
dust in forgotten lumber-rooms. If he seeks an excuse be-
yond his own curiosity, he may find it, perhaps, in the re-
flection that the past reveals to the present what the present
is^capable of seeing, and tnat the lace wnicn to one ag"e~ls
ablank _lo aiiuiJiHr- \w pfrpprnant with meaning. WnTmg
when economic science was in the first Hush ot its dogmatic
youth, it was natural that Say should dismiss as an un-
profitable dilettantism an interest in the speculations of ages
unillumined by the radiance of the new Gospel. But to de-
termine the significance of opinion is, perhaps, not alto-
gether so simple a matter as he supposed Since the brave
days when Torrens could say of Political Economy, "Twenty
years hence there will scarcely exist a doubt respecting any
of its fundamental principles/'2 how many confident certain-
ties have been undermined! How many doctrines once dis-
missed as the emptiest of superstitions have revealed an un-
suspected vitality'

The attempt to judge economic activity and social or-
ganization by ethical criteria raises problems which are
eternal, and it is possible that a study of the thought of an
age when that attempt was made, if with little success, at
least with conviction and persistence, may prove, even to-
day, not wholly without instruction. In the present century,
the old issues seem, indeed, to have acquired a new actual-
ity. The philosophy which would keep economic interests
and ethical idealism safely locked up in their separate com-
partments finds that each of the prisoners is increasingly
restive On the one hand, it is evident that the whole body
of regulations, by which modern societies set limits to the

11

12 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND

free play of economic self-interest, implies the acceptance,
whether deliberate or unconscious, of moral standards, by
reference to which certain kinds of economic conduct are
pronounced illegitimate. On the other hand, there are indi-
cations that religious thought is no longer content to dis-
miss the transactions of business and the institutions of
society as matters irrelevant to the life of the spirit.

Silently, but unmistakably, the conception of the scope
and content of Christian ethics which was generally, though
not universally, accepted in the ninPtP0"^ Tntnrv^ is un-
dergoing a revisiont and in that revision the appeal to the
experience of mankind, which is history, has played some
part, and will play a larger one. There have been periods
in which a tacit agreement, accepted in practice if not stated
in theory, excluded economic activities and social institu-
tions from examination or criticism in the light of religion
A statesman of the early nineteenth century, whose concep-
tion of the relations of Church and State appears to have
been modeled on those of Mr. Collins and Lady Catherine
de Bourgh, is said to have crushed a clerical reformer with
the protest, "Things have come to a prpf.tv pa<^ if rpliprirm
is goin£jju-4ftt£r-£prp ^it^ private life." and a more recent
occupant of his office has explained the catastrophe which
must follow, if the Church crosses the Rubicon which di-
vides the outlying provinces of the spirit from the secular
capital of public affairs "

Whatever the merit of these aphorisms, it is evident to-
day that the line of division between the spheres of religion
and secular business, which they assume as self-evident, is
shifting. By common consent the treaty of partition has
lapsed and the boundaries are once more in motion The age
of which Froude, no romantic admirer of ecclesiastical pre-
tensions, could write, with perhaps exaggerated severity,
that the spokesmen of religion "leave the present world to
the men of business and the devil," 4 shows some signs of
drawing to a close Rightly or wrongly, with wisdom or
with its opposite, not only in England but on the Continent
and in America, not only in one denomination but among
Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and Nonconformists, jan at-
tempt is being made to restatethepractical

nf fhe Christian taith,m a form sufficiently
comprehensive to provide a standard by^ which to judge the

THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 13

collective actions and institutions of mankind, in the sphere
both of international politics and of social organization. It
is being made today. It has been made in the past. Whether
it will result in any new synthesis, whether in the future at
some point pushed farther into the tough world of practical
affairs men will say,

Here nature first begins
Her farthest veige, and chaos to retire
As from her outmost works, a broken foe,

will not be known by this generation. What is certain is
that, as in the analogous problem of the relations between
Church and State, issues which were thought to have been
buried by the discretion of centuries have shown in our own
day that they were not dead, but sleeping To examine the
forms which they have assumed arid the phases through
which they have passed, even in the narrow field of a single
country and a limited period, is not mere antiquarianism.
It is to summon the living, not to invoke a corpse, dnd to
see from a new angle the problems of our own age, by wid-
ening the experience brought to their consideration.

In such an examination the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries are obviously a critical period. Dr. Figgis5 has
described the^ secularization of political theory as the most
momentous of the infplW<iifl1 changes wtii£]i ushereJlrTthe
modem workL Tt was not the less revolutionary jk£causeit
jyas_only gradually that its full consequences became lippaP"
~enT7 si) IhRt Seeds whicn were sown before the Reformation
yielded their fruit in England only after the Civil War.
The political aspects of the transformation are familiar.
The ineological mould which shaped political Jhe^yTrom
the Middle Ages to tiie seven teeiilli cWlLUfy ijLbroken; poli-
tics becomes a science, ultimately a group of sciences, and
theology at best one science among others. Reason takes
the place of revelation, and the criterion of political insti-
tutions is expediency, not religious authority. . Religion.
ceasing to be the master-interest of mankind, dwindles into
a department of life with boundaries which it fc
~ "" """"

The ground which it vacates is occupied by a new insti-
tution, armed with a novel doctrine. If the Church of the

14 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND

Middle Ages was a kind of State, the State of the Tudors
had some of the characteristics of a Church; and it was
precisely the impossibility, for all but a handful of sectaries,
of conceiving a society which treated religion as a thing pri-
vately vital but publicly indifferent, which in England made
irreconcilable the quarrel between Puritanism and the mon-
archy. When the mass had been heated in the furnace of
the Civil War, its component parts were ready to be disen-
gaged from each other. By the end of the seventeenth cen-
tury thesecular State, separate from the Churches, wETcK
are subordinate to it, hji£j^ieige(TTrbm the theory which
had regarded both as^duaTaspeas of U single soCtely. 'The
former pays a shadowy deference to religion; the latter do
not meddle with the external fabric of the political and so-
cial system, which is the concern of the former The age
of religious struggles virtually ends with the Treaty of
Westphalia in 1648 The age of the wars of economic
nationalism virtually begins with the war between Eng-
land and Holland under the Comonwealth and Charles II
The State, first in England, then in France and America,
finds its sanction, not in religion, but in nature, in a pre-
sumed contract to establish it, in the necessity for mutual
protection and the convenience of mutual assistance. It ap-
peals to no supernatural commission, but exists to protect
individuals in the enjoyment of those absolute rights which
were vested in them by the immutable laws of nature "The
great and chief end of men uniting into commonwealths and
putting themselves under government is the preservation of
their property." 6

While the political significance of this development has
often been described, the analogous changes in social and
economic thought have received less attention. They were,
however, momentous, and deserve consideration The emer-
gence of an objective and passionless economic science
took place more slowly than the corresponding movement
in the theory of the State, because the issues were less ab-
sorbing, and, while one marched in the high lights of the
open stage, the other lurked on the back stairs and in the
wings. It was not till a century after Machiavelli had
emancipated the State from religion, that the doctrine of
the self-contained department with laws of its own begins
generally to be applied to the world of business relations.

THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND IS

and even in the England of the early seventeenth century,
to discuss questions of economic organization purely in
terms of pecuniary profit and loss still wears an air of not
quite reputable cynicism. When the sixteenth century opens,
not only political but social theory is saturated with doc-
trines drawn from the sphere of ethics and religion, and
economic phenomena are expressed in terms of personal
conduct, as naturally and inevitably as the nineteenth cen-
tury expressed them in terms of mechanism.

Not the least fundamental of divisions among theories of
society is between those which regard the world of human
affairs as self-contained, and those which appeal to a super-
natural criterion Modern social theory, like modern politi-
cal theory, develops only when society is given a naturalistic
instead of a religious explanation, and a capital fact which
presides at the birth of both is a change in the conception
held of the nature and functions of a Church The crucial
period is the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The most
important arena (apart from Holland) is England, because
it is in England, with its new geographical position as the
entrepot between Europe and America, its achievement of
internal economic unity two centuries before France and
two and a half centuries before Germany, its constitutional
revolution, and its powerful bourgeoisie of bankers, ship-
owners, and merchants, that the transformation of the struc-
ture of society is earliest, swiftest, and most complete. Its
essence is the secularization of social and economic phi-
losophy The synthesis is resolved into its elements — poli-
tics, business, and spiritual exercises, each assumes a sep-
arate and independent vitality and obeys the laws of its own
being The social functions matured within the Church,
and long identified with it, are transferred to the State,
which in turn is idolized as the dispenser of prosperity and
the guardian of civilization The theory of a hierarchy of
valuer, embracing all human interests and activities in a
system of which the apex is religion, is replaced by the
conception of separate and parallel compartments, between
which a due balance should be maintained, but which have
no vital connection with each other.

The intellectual movement is, of course, very gradual,
and is compatible with both throw-backs and precocities
which seem to refute its general character. It is easy to de«

16 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND

tect premonitions of the coming philosophy in the later
Middle Ages, and reversions to an earlier manner at the very
end of the seventeenth century. Oresme in the fourteenth
century can anticipate the monetary theory associatd with
the name of Gresham; in the fifteenth century Laurentius
de Rudolfis can distinguish between trade bills and finance
bills, and St. Antonino describe the significance of capital;
while Baxter in 1673 can write a Christian Directory in
the style of a medieval Summa, and Bunyan in 1680 can
dissect the economic iniquities of Mr. Badman, who ground
the poor with high prices and usury, in the manner of a
medieval friar 7 But the distance traversed in the two cen-
turies between 1500 and 1700 is, nevertheless, immense At
the earlier date, though economic rationalism has proceeded
far in Italy, the typical economic systems are those of the
Schoolmen, the typical popular teaching is that of the ser-
mon, or of manuals such as Dives et Pauper; the typical
appeal in difficult cases of conscience is to the Bible, the
Fathers, the canon law and its interpreters; the typical con-
troversy is carried on in terms of morality and religion as
regularly and inevitably as two centuries later it is con-
ducted in terms of economic expediency.

It is not necessary to point out that the age of Henry
VIII and Thomas Cromwell had nothing to learn from the
twentieth century as to the niceties of political intrigue or
commercial sharp practice. But a cynical unscrupulousness
in high places is not incompatible with a general belief in
the validity of moral standards which are contradicted by it.
No one can read the discussions which took place between
1500 and 1550 on three burning issues — the rise in prices,
capital and interest, and the land question in England —
without being struck by the constant appeal from the new
and clamorous economic interests of the day to the tradi-
tional Christian morality, which in social organization, as
in the relations of individuals, is still conceived to be the
final authority. It is because it is regarded as the final au-
thority that the officers of the Church claim to be heard on
questions of social policy; and that, however Catholics, An-
glicans, Lutherans, and Calvinists may differ on doctrine or
ecclesiastical government, Luther and Calvin, Latimer and
Laud, John Knox and the Pilgrim Fathers are agreed that
social morality is the province of the Church, and are pre-

THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 17

pared both to teach it, and to enforce it, when necessary, by
suitable discipline.

By the middle of the seventeenth century all that is al-
tered. After the Restoration, we are in a new world of
economic, as well as of political, thought. The claim of
religion, at best a shadowy claim, to maintain rules of good
conscience in economic affairs finally vanished with the de-
struction of Laud's experiment in a confessional State, and
with the failure of the work of the Westminster Assembly.
After the Civil War, the attempt to maintain the theory
that there was a Christian standard of economic conduct
was impossible, not only because of lay opposition, but be-
cause the division of the Churches made it evident that no
common standard existed which could be enforced by ec-
clesiastical machinery. The doctrine of the Restoration
economists,8 that, as proved by the experience of Holland,
trade and tolerance flourished together, had its practical sig-
nificance in the fact that neither could prosper without large
concessions to individualism

The ground which is vacated by the Christian moralist
is quickly occupied by theorists of another order. The
future for the next two hundred years is not with the at-
tempt to reaffirm, with due allowance for altered circum-
stances, the conception that a moral rule is binding on Chris-
tians in their economic transactions, but with the new sci-
ence of Political Arithmetic, which asserts, at first with hesi-
tation and then with confidence, that no moral rule beyond
the letter of the law exists. Influenced in its method by the
contemporary progress of mathematics and physics, it han-
dles economic phenomena, not as a casuist, concerned to dis-
tinguish right from wrong, but as a scientist, applying a new
calculus to impersonal economic forces Its method, temper,
and assumptions are accepted by all educated men, including
the clergy, even though its particular conclusions continue
for long to be disputed. Its greatest English exponent, be-
fore the days of Adam Smith, is the Reverend Dr. Tucker,
Dean of Gloucester.

Some of the particular stages in this transition will be
discussed later. But that there was a transition, and that
the intellectual and moral conversion which it produced was
not less momentous than the effect of some more familiar
intellectual revolutions, is undeniable. Nor is it to be re-

18 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND

futed by insisting that economic motives and economic needs
are as old as history, or that the appeal to religion is often
a decorous drapery for a triumphant materialism. A me-
dieval cynic, in expounding the canon law as to usury, re-
marked that "he who takes it goes to hell, and he who does
not goes to the workhouse." 9 Mr. Coulton does well to re-
mind us that, even in the Age of Faith, resounding princi-
ples were compatible with very sordid practice. In a dis-
cussion which has as its subject social thought, not the his-
tory of business organization, it is not necessary to elab-
orate that truism. Only the credulous or the disillusioned
will contrast successive periods as light with darkness or
darkness with light, or yield to the temper which finds ro-
mantic virtues in every age except its own. To appraise the
merits of different theories of social organization must be
left to those who feel confident that they possess an ade-
quate criterion. All that can be attempted in these pages
is to endeavor to understand a few among them.

For, after all, because doctrine and conduct diverge, it
does not follow that to examine the former is to hunt ab-
stractions. That men should have thought as they did is
sometimes as significant as that they should have acted as
they did, and not least significant when thought and prac-
tice are at variance. It may be true that "theory is a criti-
cism of life only in the same sense as a good man is a criti-
cism of a bad one " But the emphasis of the theorist on
certain aspects and values is not arbitrary, but is itself an
interpretation, and, if his answers are to be discounted, his
questions are none the less evidence as to the assumptions
of the period in which they were asked. It would be para-
doxical to dismiss Machiavelli and Locke and Smith and
Bentham as irrelevant to the political practice of their age,
merely on the ground that mankind has still to wait for the
ideal Prince or Whig or Individualist or Utilitarian. It is
not less paradoxical to dismiss those who formulated eco-
nomic and social theories in the Middle Ages or in the six-
teenth century merely because, behind canon law and sum-
mae and sermons, behind the good ordinances of borough
and gild, behind statutes and proclamations and prerogative
courts, there lurked the immutable appetites of the eco-
nomic man.

There is an evolution of ideas, as well as of organisms,

THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 19

and the quality of civilization depends, as Professor Wallas
has so convincingly shown, on the transmission, less of phys-
ical qualities, than of a complex structure of habits, knowl-
edge, and beliefs, the destruction of which would be fol-
lowed within a year by the death of half the human race.
Granted that the groundwork of inherited dispositions with
which the individual is born has altered little in recorded
history, the interests and values which compose his world
have undergone a succession of revolutions. The conven-
tional statement that human nature does not change is plau-
sible only so long as attention is focused on those aspects of
it which are least distinctively human. The wolf is today
what he was when he was hunted by Nirnrod. But, while
men are born with many of the characteristics of wolves,
man is a wulf domesticated, who both transmits the arts
by which he has been partially tamed and improves upon
them He stens into a social inheritance, to which each
generation adds its own contribution of good and evil, be-
fore it bequeaths it to its successors.

There is a moral and religious, as well as a material, en-
vironment, which sets its stamp on the individual, even
when he is least conscious of it And the effect of changes
in this environment is not less profound. The economic
categories of modern society, such as pioperty, freedom of
contract and competition, are as much a part of its intel-
lectual furniture as its political conceptions, and, together
with religion, have probably been the most potent force in
giving it its character Between the conception of society
as a community of unequal classes with varying functions,
organized for a common end, and that which regards it as a
mechanism adjuring itself through the play of economic
motives to the supply of economic needs; between the idea
that a man miibt not take advantage of his neighbor's neces-
sity, and the doctrine that "man's self-love is God's provi-
dence"; between the attitude which appeals to a religious
standard to repress economic appetites, and that which re-
gards expediency as the final criterion — there is a chasm
which no theory of the permanence and ubiquity of eco-
nomic interests can bridge, and which deserves at least to
be exploied To examine how the latter grew out of the
former; to trace the change, from a view of economic ac-
tivity which regarded it as one among other kinds of moral

20 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND

conduct, to the view of it as dependent upon impersonal
and almost automatic forces; to observe the struggle of in-
dividualism, in the face of restrictions imposed in the name
of religion by the Church and of public policy by the State,
first denounced, then palliated, then triumphantly justified
in the name of economic liberty ; to watch how ecclesiastical
authority strives to maintain its hold upon the spheres it
had claimed and finally abdicates them — to do this is not to
indulge a vain curiosity, but to stand at the sources of rivu-
lets which are now a flood.

Has religious opinion in the past regarded questions of
social organization and economic conduct as irrelevant to
the life of the spirit, or has it endeavored not only to chris-
tianize the individual but to make a Christian civilization?
Can religion admit the existence of a sharp antithesis be-
tween personal morality and the practices which are per-
missible in business? Does the idea of a Church involve
the. acceptance of any particular standard of social ethics,
and, if so, ought a Church to endeavor to enforce it as
among the obligations incumbent on its members? Such are
a few of the questions which men are asking today, and on
which a more competent examination of history than I can
hope to offer might throw at any rate an oblique and waver-
ing light.

I THE SOCIAL ORGANISM

We are asking these questions today Men were asking
the same question, thought in different language, through-
out the sixteenth century. It is a commonplace that modern
economic history begins with a series of revolutionary
changes in the direction and organization of commerce, in
finance, in prices, and in agriculture. To the new economic
situation men brought a body of doctrine, law and tradi-
tion, hammered out during the preceding three centuries.
Since the new forces were bewildering, and often shocking,
to conservative consciences, moralists and religious teachers
met them at first by a re-affirmation of the traditional doc-
trines, by which, it seemed, their excesses might be restrained
and their abuses corrected. As the changed environment
became, not a novelty, but an established fact, these doc-
trines had to be modified. As the effects of the Reformation

THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 21

developed, different churches produced characteristic dif-
ferences of social opinion.

But these were later developments, which only gradually
became apparent. The new economic world was not ac-
cepted without a struggle. Apart from a few extremists,
the first generation of reformers were rarely innovators in
matters of social theory, and quoted Fathers and church
councils, decretals and canon lawyers, in complete uncon-
sciousness that innovations in doctrine and church govern-
ment involved any breach with what they had learned to
regard as the moral tradition of Christendom. Hence the
sixteenth century sees a collision, not only between different
schools of religious thought, but between the changed eco-
nomic environment and the accepted theory of society. To
understand it, one must place oneself at the point from
which it started. One must examine, however summarily,
the historical background.

That background consisted of the body of social theory
stated and implicit, which was the legacy of the Middle
Ages. The formal teaching was derived from the Bible,
the works of the Fathers and Schoolmen, the canon law and
its commentators, and had been popularized in sermons and
religious manuals. The informal assumptions were those
implicit in law, custom, and social institutions. Both were
complex, and to speak of them as a unity is to sacrifice
truth to convenience. It may be that the political historian
is justified when he covers with a single phrase the five
centuries or more to which tradition has assigned the title
of the Middle Ages. For the student of economic condi-
tions that suggestion of homogeneity is the first illusion
to be discarded.

The medieval economic world was marked, it is true,
by certain common characteristics. They sprang from the
fact that on the west it was a closed system, that on the
north it had so much elbow-room as was given by the Baltic
and the rivers emptying themselves into it, and that on the
east, where it was open, the apertures were concentrated
along a comparatively short coast-line from Alexandria to
the Black Sea, so that they were easily commanded by any
naval power dominating the eastern Mediterranean, and eas-
ily cut by any military power which could squat across the
trade routes before they reached the sea. While, however,

22 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND

these broad facts determined that the two main currents of
trade should run from east to west and north to south, and
that the most progressive economic life of the age should
cluster in the regions from which these currents started
and where they met, within this general economic frame-
work there was the greatest variety of condition and devel-
opment The contours of economic civilization ran on dif-
ferent lines from those of subsequent centuries, but the
contrast between mountain and valley was not less clearly
marked. If the sites on which a complex economic struc-
ture rose were far removed from those of later genera-
tions, it flourished none the less where conditions favored
its growth In spite of the ubiquity of manor and gild,
there was as much difference between the life of a center
of capitalist industry, like fifteenth-century Flanders, or a
center of capitalist finance, like fifteenth-century Florence,
and a pastoral society exporting raw materials and a little
food, like medieval England, as there is between modern
Lancashire or London and modern Denmark To draw
from English conditions a picture of a whole world stagnat-
ing in economic squalor, or basking in economic innocence,
is as absurd as to reconstruct the economic life of Europe in
the twentieth century from a study of the Shetland Islands
or the Ukraine The elements in the social theory of the
Middle Ages were equally various, and equally changing.
Even if the student confines himself to the body of doctrine
which is definitely associated with leligion, and takes as
typical of it the Summac of the Schoolmen, he finds it in
constant process of development The economic teaching of
St. Antonmo in the fifteenth century, for example, was far
more complex and realistic than that of St Thomas in the
thirteenth, and down to the very end of the Middle Ages
the best-established and most characteristic parts of the sys-
tem— for example, the theory of prices and of usury — so
far from being stationary, were steadily modified and elabo-
rated.

There are, perhaps, four main attitudes which religious
opinion may adopt toward the world of social institutions
and economic relations. It may stand on one side in ascetic
aloofness and regard them as in their very nature the sphere
of unrighteousness, from which men may escape — from
which, if they consider their souls, they will escape — but

THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 23

which they can conquer only by flight. It may take them
for granted and ignore them, as matters of indifference be-
longing to a world with which religion has no concern; in
all ages the prudence of looking problems boldly in the face
and passing on has seemed too self-evident to require justi-
fication. It may throw itself into an agitation for some par-
ticular reform, for the removal of some crying scandal, for
the promotion of some final revolution, which will inaug-
urate the reign of righteousness on earth. It may at once
accept and criticize, tolerate and amend, welcome the gross
world of human appetites, as the squalid scaffolding from
amid which the life of the spirit must rise, and insist that
this also is the material of the Kingdom of God. To such
a temper, all activities divorced from religion are brutal or
dead, but none are too mean to be beneath or too great to
be above it, since all, in their different degrees, are touched
with the spirit which permeates the whole. It finds its most
sublime expression in the words of Piccarda: "Paradise is
everywhere, though the grace of the highest good is not
shed every where in the same degree."

Each of these attitudes meets us today. Each meets us
in the thought of the Middle Ages, as differences of period
and place and economic environment and personal tempera-
ment evoke it. In the early Middle Ages the ascetic temper
predominates Lanfranc, for example, who sees nothing in
economic life but the struggle of wolves over carrion, thinks
that men of business can hardly be saved, for they live by
cheating and profiteering.10 It is monasticism, with its repu-
diation of the prizes and temptations of the secular world,
which is par excellence the life of religion. As one phase
of it succumbed to ease and affluence, another rose to re-
store the primitive austerity, and the return to evangelical
poverty, preached by St. Francis but abandoned by many
of his followers, was the note of the majority of move-
ments for reform. As for indifferentism — what else, for
all its communistic phrases, is Wyclif's teaching, that the
"just man is already lord of all" and that "in this world
God must serve the devil," but an anticipation of the doc-
trine of celestial happiness as the compensation for earthly
misery, to which Hobbes gave a cynical immortality when
he wrote that the persecuted, instead of rebelling, "must
expect their reward in Heaven," and which Mr. and Mrs*

24 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND

Hammond have revealed as an opiate dulling both the pain
and the agitation of the Industrial Revolution? If obscure
sects like the Poor Men of Lyons are too unorthodox to be
cited, the Friars are not, and it was not only Langland and
that gentlemanly journalist, Froissart, who accused them —
the phrase has a long history — of stirring up class hatred

To select from so immense a sea of ideas about society
and religion only the specimens that fit the meshes of one's
own small net, and to label them "medieval thought," is
to beg all questions. Ideas have a pedigree which, if real-
ized, would often embarrass their exponents The day has
long since passed when it could be suggested that only one-
half of modern Christianity has its root in medieval re-
ligion. There is a medieval Puritanism and rationalism
as well as a medieval Catholicism In the field of
ecclesiastical theory, as Mr. Manning has pointed out in
his excellent book,11 Gregory VII and Boniface VIII and
their true successors in Calvin and Knox What is true of
religion and political thought is equally true of economic
and social doctrines. The social theories of Luther and
Latimer, of Bucer and Bullinger, of sixteenth-century Ana-
baptists and seventeenth-century Levellers, of Puritans like
Baxter, Anglicans like Laud, Baptists like Bunyan, Quakers
like Sellers, are all the children of medieval parents Like
the Church today in regions which have not yet emerged
from savagery, the Church of the earlier Middle Ages had
been engaged in an immense missionary effort, in which,
as it struggled with the surrounding barbarism, the work
of conversion and of social construction had been almost
indistinguishable. By the very nature of its task, as much
as by the intention of its rulers, it had become the greatest
of political institutions For good or evil it aspired to be,
not a sect, but a civilization, and, when its unity was shat-
tered at the Reformation, the different Churches which
emerged from it endeavored, according to their different
opportunities, to perpetuate the same tradition Asceticism
or renunciation, quietism or indifferentism, the zeal which
does well to be angry, the temper which seeks a synthesis
of the external order and the religion of the spirit — all
alike, in one form or another, are represented in the reli-
gious thought and practice of the Middle Ages.

All are represented in it, but not all are equally repre-

THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 25

sentative of it. Of the four attitudes suggested above, it is
that last which is most characteristic. The first fundamental
assumption which is taken over by the sixteenth century is
that the ultimate standard of human institutions and activi-
ties is religion. The architectonics of the system had been
worked out in the Summae of the Schoolmen. In sharp
contrast to the modern temper, which takes the destination
for granted, and is thrilled by the hum of the engine, me-
dieval religious thought strains every interest and activity,
by however arbitrary a compression, into the service of a
single idea The lines of its scheme run up and down, and,
since purpose is universal and all-embracing, there is, at
least in theory, no room for eccentric bodies which move in
their own private orbit That purpose is set by the divine
plan of the universe. "The perfect happiness of man can-
not be other than the vision of the divine essence." 12

Hence all activities fall within a single system, because all,
though with different degrees of immediateness, are related
to a single end, and derive their significance from it. The
Church in its wider sense is the Christian Commonwealth,
within which that end is to be realized; in its narrower
sense it is the hierarchy divinely commissioned for its in-
terpretation, in both it embraces the whole of life, and its
authority is final. Though practice is perpetually at vari-
ance with theory, there is no absolute division between the
inner and personal life, which is "the sphere of religion,"
and the practical interests, the external order, the impersonal
mechanism, to which, if some modern teachers may be
trusted, religion is irrelevant

There is no absolute division, but there is a division of
quality. There are — to use a modern phrase — degrees of
reality. The distinctive feature of medieval thought is that
contrasts which later were to be presented as irreconcilable
antitheses appear in it as differences within a larger unity,
and that the world of social organization, originating in
physical necessities, passes by insensible gradations into that
of the spirit. . Man shares with other animals the necessity
of maintaining and perpetuating his species, in addition,
as a natural creature, he has what is peculiar to himself,
an inclination to the life of the intellect and of society —
"to know the truth about God and to live in communities." 13
These activities, which form his life according to the law

26 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND

of nature, may be regarded, and sometimes are regarded,
as indifferent or hostile to the life of the spirit. But the
characteristic thought is different. It is that of a synthesis.
Vlhe contrast between nature and grace, between human
appetites and interests and religion, is not absolute, but
relative. It is a contrast of matter and the spirit informing
it, of stages in a process, of preparation and fruition Grace
works on the unregenerate nature of man, not to destroy it,
but to transform it. And what is true of the individual is
true of society. An attempt is made to give it a new sig-
nificance by relating it to the purpose of human life as
known by revelation. In the words of a famous (or no-
torious) Bull: "The -way of religion is to lead the things
which are lower to Trle^hings which jare higher through
the things which are interfn^iateixx^ccording to the law
of the universe all things ar^fe^jeduced to order equally
and immediately; buMjb^fewest ^Jtequgh the intermediate,
the intermediatft-*bffj!6gh the higher.^1 Thus social insti-
tutions assume a character which may almost be called sac-
ramental, for they are the outward and imperfect expres-
sion of a supreme spiritual reality. Ideally conceived, so-
ciety is an organism of different grades, and human activi-
ties form a hierarchy of functions, which differ in kind and
in significance, but each of which is of value on its own
plane, provided that it is governed, however remotely, by
the end which is common to all,VLike the celestial order, of
which it is the dim reflection, sotiety is stable, because it is
straining upwards:

Anzi e formale ad esto beato esse

Tenersi dentro alia divma vogha,

Per ch' una fansi nostre voghe stesse

Needless to say, metaphysics, however sublime, were not
the daily food of the Middle Ages, any more than of today.
The fifteenth century saw an outburst of commercial ac-
tivity and of economic speculation, and by the middle of it
all this teaching was becoming antiquated. Needless to say,
also, general ideas cannot be kept in compartments, and the
teleology of medieval speculation colored the interpretation
of common affairs, as it was colored by physics in the
eighteenth century and by the idea of evolution in the nine-

THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 27

teenth. If the first legacy of the Middle Ages to the six-
teenth century was the idea of religion as embracing all
aspects of human life, the second and third flowed naturally
from the working of that idea in the economic environ-
ment of the time. They may be called, respectively, the
functional view of class organization, and the doctrine of
economic ethics, j

From the twelfth century to the sixteenth, from the work
of Beckett's secretary in 1159 to the work of Henry VIII's
chaplain in 1537, the analogy by which society is described
— an analogy at once fundamental and commonplace — is the
same 1"> Invoked in every economic crisis to rebuke extor-
tion and dissension with a high doctrine of social solidarity,
it was not finally discarded till the rise of a theoretical in-
dividualism in England in the seventeenth century. It is
that of the human body The gross facts of the social order
are accepted in all their harshness and brutality. They are
accepted with astonishing docility, and, except on rare oc-
casions, there is no question of reconstruction. What they
include is no trifle. It is nothing less than the whole edifice
of feudal society — class privilege, class oppression, exploita-
tion, serfdom. But these things cannot, it is thought, be
treated as simply alien to religion, for religion is all-compre-
hensive. They must be given some ethical meaning, must be
shown to be the expression of some larger plan. The mean-
ing given them is simple4fThe facts of class status and in-
equality were rationalized in the Middle Ages by a func-
tional theory of society* as the facts of competition were
rationalized in the eighteenth by the theory of economic
harmonies, and the former took the same delight in contem-
plating the moral purpose revealed in social organization
as the latter in proving that to the curious mechanism of
human society a moral purpose was superfluous or disturb-
ing. Society, like the human body, is an oiganism composed
of different members. Each member has its own function,
prayer, or defense, or merchandise, or tilling the soil. Each
must receive the means suited to its station, and must claim
no more. Within classes there must be equality; if one takes
into his hand the living of two, his neighbor will go short.
Between classes there must be inequality; for otherwise a
class cannot perform its function, or — a strange thought to
us — enjoy its rights. Peasants must not encroach on those

28 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND

above them. Lords must not despoil peasants. Craftsmen
and merchants must receive what will maintain them in their
calling, and no morer^

As a rule of social policy, the doctrine was at once repres-
sive and protective. "There is degree above degree, as rea-
son is, and skill it is that men do their devoir thereas it is
due. But certes, extortions and despite of your underlings
is damnable.'' lb As a philosophy of society, it attempted
to spiritualize the material by incorporating it in a divine
universe, which should absorb and transform it To that
process of transmutation the life of mere money-making
was recalcitrant, and hence, indeed, the stigma attached to
it. For, in spite of the ingenuity of theorists, finance and
trade, the essence of which seemed to be, not service, but a
mere appetitus dimtiarum infinitus, were not easily inter-
preted in terms of social function. Comparatively late in-
truders in a world dominated by conceptions hammered out
in a pre-commercial age, they were never fitted harmoni-
ously into the medieval synthesis, and ultimately, when they
grew to their full stature, were to contribute to its over-
throw. But the property of the feudal lord, the labor of
the peasant or the craftsman, even the ferocity of the war-
rior, were not dismissed as hostile or indifferent to the life
of the spirit. Touched by the spear of Ithuriel, they were
to be sublimated into service, vocation and chivalry, and
the ritual which surrounded them was designed to empha-
size that they had undergone a re-dedication at the hands of
religion. Baptized by the Church, privilege and power be-
came office and duty

That the reconciliation was superficial, and that in at-
tempting it the Church often degraded itself without raising
the world, is as indisputable as that its tendency was to dig-
nify material interests, by stamping them with the impress
of a universal design. Gentlemen took hard tallages and
oppressed the poor; but it was something that they should
be told that their true function was "to defend God's law by
power of the world." 17 Craftsmen — the burden of end-
less sermons — worked deceitfully, but it was perhaps not
wholly without value that they should pay even lip-service
to the ideal of so conducting their trade, that the common
people should not be defrauded by the evil ingenuity of
those exercising the craft. If lord and peasant, merchant

THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 29

and artisan, burgess and villager, pressed each other hard,
was it meaningless to meet their struggles with an assertion
of universal solidarity, to which economic convenience and
economic power must alike give way? "The health of the
whole commonwealth will be assured and vigorous, if the
higher members consider the lower and the lower answer in
like manner the higher, so that each is in turn a member
of every other." 18

If the medieval moralist was often too naive in expecting
sound practice as the result of lofty principles alone, he was
at least free from that not unfashionable form of credulity
which expects it from their absence or from their opposite.
To say that the men to whom such teaching was addressed
went out to rob and cheat is to say no more than that they
were men Nor is it self-evident that they would have been
more likely to be honest, if they had been informed, like
some of their descendants, that competition was designed
by Providence to provide an automatic substitute for hon-
esty .^Society was interpreted, in short, not as the expres-
sion o? economic self-interest, but as held together by a
system of mutual, though varying, obligations Social well-
being exists, it was thought, in so far as each class performs
its functions and enjoys the rights proportioned thereto.
"The Church is divided in these three parts, preachers, an3"
defenders, and laborers ... As she is our mother,

so she is a body, and health of this body stands in this, that
one part of her answer to another, after the same measure
that Jesus Christ has ordained it ... Kindly man's hand
helps his head, and his eye helps his foot, and his foot his
body . . and thus should it be in parts of the Church. . . .
As divers parts of man served unkindly to man if one took
the service of another and left his own proper work, so div-
ers parts of the Church have proper works to serve God;
and if one part leave his work that God has limited him
and take work of another part, sinful wonder is in the
Church Surely the Church shall never be whole be-

fore proportions of her parts be brought again by this
heavenly leech and fbyl medicine of men.7'19

Speculation does not develope in vacua. It echoes, how-
ever radical it is, the established order. Clearly this pa-
triarchal doctrine is a softened reflection of the feudal land
system. Not less clearly the Church's doctrine of economic

30 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND

ethics is the expression of the conditions of medieval in-
dustry. A religious philosophy, unless it is frankly to aban-
don nine-tenths of conduct to the powers of darkness, can-
not admit the doctrine of a world of business and economic
relations self-sufficient and divorced from ethics and re-
ligion. But the facts may be difficult to moralize, or they
may be relatively easy. Over a great part of Europe in the
later Middle Ages, the economic environment was less in-
tractable than it had been in the days of the Empire or than
it is today. In the great commercial centers there was
sometimes, it is true, a capitalism as inhuman as any which
the world has seen, and from time to time ferocious class
wars between artisans and merchants 20 But outsioV them
trade, industry, the money market, all that we call the eco-
nomic system, was not a system, but a mass of individual
trades and individual dealings Pecuniary transactions were
a fringe on a world of natural economy. There was little
mobility or competition There was very little large-scale
organization. With some important exceptions, such as the
textile workers of Flanders and Italy, who, in the fourteenth
century, again and again rose in revolt, the medieval arti-
san, especially in backward countries like England, was a
small master The formation of temporary organizations,
or "parliaments," of wage-earners, which goes on in Lon-
don even before the end of the thirteenth century,"1 and the
growth of journeymen's associations in the later Middle
Ages, are a proof that the conditions which produced mod-
ern trade unionism were not unknown But even in a great
city like Paris the 128 gilds which existed at the end of the
thirteenth century appear to have included 5,000 masters,
who employed not more than 6,000 to 7,000 journeymen.
At Frankfurt-am-Mam in 1387 actually not more than
750 to 800 journeymen are estimated to have been in the
service of 1,554 masters.2"

In cities of this kind, with their freedom, their com-
parative peace, and their strong corporate feeling, large
enough to be prolific of associations and small enough for
each man to know his neighbor, an ethic of mutual aid was
not wholly impossible, and it is in the light of such condi-
tions that the most characteristic of medieval industrial in-
stitutions is to be interpreted. To suggest that anything
like a majority of medieval workers were ever members of

THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 31

a craft gild is extravagant. In England, at any rate, more
than nine- tenths were peasants, among whom, though
friendly societies called gilds were common, there was nat-
urally no question of craft organization. Even in the towns
it is a question whether there was not a considerable popu-
lation of casual workers — consider only the number of un-
skilled workers that must have been required as laborers
by the craftsmen building a cathedral in the days before
mechanical cranes — who were rarely organized in perma-
nent societies. To invest the craft gilds with a halo of eco-
nomic chivalry is not less inappropriate They were, first
and foremost, monopolists, and the cases in which their
vested interests came into collision with the consumer were
not a few Wyclif, with his almost modern devotion to the
conception of a unitary society over-riding particular in-
terests for the common good, was naturally prejudiced
against corporations, on the ground that they distracted so-
cial unity by the intrusion of sectarian cupidities and sinis-
ter ambitions, but there was probably from time to time
more than a little justification for his complaint that "all
new fraternities or gilds made of men seem openly to run
in this curse [against false conspirators | /' because "they
conspire to bear up each other, yea, in wrong, and oppress
other men in their right by their wit and power '' 2ti It is
significant that the most striking of the projects of political
and social reconstruction produced in Germany in the cen-
tury before the Reformation proposed the complete aboli-
tion of gilds, as intolerably corrupt and tyrannical.24

There are, however, monopolists and monopolists. An
age in which combinations are not tempted to pay lip-service
to religion may do well to remember that the characteristic,
after all, of the medieval gild was that, if it sprang from
economic needs, it claimed, at least, to subordinate them to
social interests, as conceived by men for whom the social
and the spiritual were inextricably intertwined "Tout ce
petit monde antique," writes the historian of French gilds,
"etait fortement imbu des idees chretiennes sur le juste
salaire et le juste prix; sans doute il y avait alors, comme
aujourd'hui, des cupidites et des convoitises; mais une regie
puissante s'imposait a tous et d'une maniere generate exi-
geait pour chacun le pain quotidien promis par 1'Evan-
gile." 25 The attempt to preserve a rough equality among

32 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND

"the good men of the mistery," to check economic egotism
by insisting that every brother shall share his good fortune
with another and stand by his neighbor in need, to resist
the encroachments of a conscienceless money-power, to pre-
serve professional standards of training and craftsmanship,
and to repress by a strict corporate discipline the natural
appetite of each to snatch special advantages for himself
to the injury of all — whether these things outweigh the evils
of conservative methods and corporate exclusiveness is a
question which each student will answer in accordance with
his own predilections. What is clear, at least, is that both
the rules of fraternities and the economic teaching of the
Church were prompted by the problems of a common en-
vironment. Much that is now mechanical was then personal,
intimate and direct, and there was little room for organi-
zation on a scale too vast for the standards that are applied
to individuals, or for the doctrine which silences scruples
and closes all accounts with the final plea of economic ex-
pediency.

Such an environment, with its personal economic rela-
tions, was a not unfavorable field for a system of social
ethics. And the Church, which brought to its task the tre-
mendous claim to mediate between even the humblest ac-
tivity and the divine purpose, sought to supply it. True, its
teaching was violated in practice, and violated grossly, in
the very citadel of Christendom which promulgated it. Con-
temporaries were under no illusion as to the reality of eco-
nomic motives in the Age of Faith. They had only to look
at Rome. From the middle of the thirteenth century a
continuous wail arises against the iniquity of the Church,
and its burden may be summed up in one word, "avarice."
At Rome, everything is for sale What is reverenced is the
gospel, not according to St. Mark, but according to the
marks of silver.26

Cum ad papam venens, habc pro constant!,
Non est locus paupen, soli iavct danti.

Papa, si rem tangimus, nomen habet a re,
Quicquid habent alii, solus vult paparc ,
Vel, si verbum galhcum vis apocopare,
'Payez, payez,' dtt le mot, si vis imoetrare.27

THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 33

The Papacy might denounce usurers, but, as the center
of the most highly organized administrative system of the
age, receiving remittances from all over Europe, and re-
ceiving them in money at a time when the revenue of other
Governments still included personal services and payments
in kind, it could not dispense with them. Dante put the
Cahorsine money-lenders in hell, but a Pope gave them the
title of ''peculiar sons of the Roman Church. r -tS Grosstete
rebuked the Lombard bankers, and a bishop of London ex-
pelled them, but papal protection brought them back.2'*
Archbishop Peckham, a few years later, had to implore
Pope Nicholas III to withdraw a threat of excommunica-
tion, intended to compel him to pay the usurious interest
demanded by Italian money-lenders, though, as the arch-
bishop justly observed, uby your Holiness's special man-
date, it would be my duty to take strong measures against
such lenders." 80 The Papacy was, in a sense, the greatest
financial institution of the Middle Ages, and, as its fiscal
system was elaborated, things became, not better, but worse.
The abuses which were a trickle in the thirteenth century
were a torrent in the fifteenth. And the frailties of Rome,
if exceptional in their notoriety, can hardly be regarded as
unique. Priests, it is from time to time complained, engage
in trade and take usury.31 Cathedral chapters lend money
at high rates of interest. The profits of usury, like those
of simony, should have been refused by churchmen, as hate-
ful to God; but a bishop of Paris, when consulted by a
usurer as to the salvation of his soul, instead of urging res-
titution, recommended him to dedicate his ill-gotten wealth
to the building of Notre-Dame.32 "Thus," exclaimed St.
Bernard, as he gazed at the glories of Gothic architecture,
"wealth is drawn up by ropes of wealth, thus money bring-
eth money. ... 0 vanity of vanities, yet no more vain
than insane! The Church is resplendent in her walls, beg-
garly in her poor. She clothes her stones in gold, and
leaves her sons naked.'' ^

The picture is horrifying, and one must be grateful to
those, like M. Luchaire and Mr. Coulton, who demolish
romance. But the denunciation of vices implies that they
are recognized as vicious; to ignore their condemnation is
not less one-sided than to conceal their existence; and, when
the halo has vanished from practice, it remains to ask what

34 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND

principles men valued, and what standards they erected.
The economic doctrines elaborated in the Summac of the
Schoolmen, in which that question receives its most sys-
tematic answer, have not infrequently been dismissed as the
fanciful extravagances of writers disqualified from throw-
ing light on the affairs of this world by their morbid pre-
occupation with those of the next. In reality, whatever
may be thought of their conclusions, both the occasion and
the purpose of scholastic speculations upon economic ques-
tions were eminently practical. The movement which
prompted them was the growth of trade, of town life, and
of a commercial economy, in a world whose social categories
were still those of the self-sufficing village and the feudal
hierarchy. The object of their authors was to solve the
problems to which such developments gave rise. It was to
reconcile the new contractual relations, which sprang from
economic expansion, with the traditional morality expounded
by the Church. Viewed by posterity as reactionaries, who
damned the currents of economic enterprise with an irrel-
evant appeal to Scripture and to the Fathers, in their own
age they were the pioneers of a liberal intellectual move-
ment. By lifting the weight of antiquated formulae they
cleared a space within the stiff framework of religious au-
thority for new and mobile economic interests, and thus
supplied an intellectual justification for developments which
earlier generations would have condemned.

The mercantilist thought of later centuries owed a con-
siderable debt to scholastic discussions of money, prices, and
interest. But the specific contributions of medieval writers
to the technique of economic theory were less significant
than their premises. Their fundamental assumptions, both
of which were to leave a deep imprint on the social thought
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were two: that
economic interests are subordinate to the real business of
life, which is salvation, and that economic conduct is one
aspect of personal conduct, upon which, as on other parts
of it, the rules of morality are binding. Material riches are
necessary; they have a secondary importance, since without
them men cannot support themselves and help one another;
the wise ruler, as St. Thomas said/4 will consider in found-
ing his State the natural resources of the country. But eco-
nomic motives are suspect. Because they are powerful ap-

THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 35

petites, men fear them, but they are not mean enough to ap-
plaud them. Like other strong passions, what they need,
it is thought, is not a clear field, but repression. There is
no place in medieval theory for economic activity which is
not related to a moral end, and to found a science of society
upon the assumption that the appetite for economic gain is a
constant and measurable force, to be accepted, like other
natural forces, as an inevitable and self-evident datum
would have appeared to the medieval thinker as hardly less
irrational or less immoral than to make the premise of social
philosophy the unrestrained operation of such necessary hu-
man attributes as pugnacity or the sexual instinct. The
outer is ordained for the sake of the inner; economic goods
are instrumental — sicut quaedam admimcula, quibus ad-
juvamur ad tcndendum in beatitudincm. "It is lawful to
desire temporal blessings, not putting them in the first place,
as though setting up our rest in them, but regarding them
as aids to blessedness, inasmuch as they support our cor-
poral life and serve as instruments for acts of virtue." 35
Riches, as St Antonino says, exist for man, not man for
riches.

At every turn, therefore, there are limits, restrictions,
warnings against allowing economic interests to interfere
with serious affairs. It is right for a man to seek such
wealth as is necessary for a livelihood in his station. To
seek more is not enterprise, but avarice, and avarice is a
deadly sin. Trade is legitimate; the different resources of
different countries show that it was intended by Providence.
But it is a dangerous business. A man must be sure that
he carries it on for the public benefit, and that the profits
which he takes are no more than the wages of his labor.
Private property is a necessary institution, at least in a
fallen world; men work more and dispute less when goods
are private than when they are common. But it is to be
tolerated as a concession to human frailty, not applauded as
desirable in itself, the ideal — if only man's nature could
rise to it — is communism. "Communis enim," wrote Gra-
tian in his decretum, "usus omnium, quae sunt in hoc mundo,
omnibus hominibus esse debuit." 3b At best, indeed, the es-
tate is somewhat encumbered. It must be legitimately ac-
quired. It must be in the largest possible number of hands.
It must provide for the support of the poor. Its use must

36 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND

as far as practicable be common. Its owners must be ready
to share it with those who need, even if they are not in ac-
tual destitution. Such were the conditions which com-
mended themselves to an archbishop of the business capital
of fifteenth-century Europe.37 There have been ages in
which they would have been described, not as a justification
of property, but as a revolutionary assault on it. For to de-
fend the property of the peasant and small master is neces-
sarily to attack that of the monopolist and usurer, which
grows by devouring it.

The assumption on which all this body of doctrine rested
was simple. It was that the danger of economic interests
increased in direct proportion to the prominence of the pe-
cuniary motives associated with them. Labor — the common
lot of mankind — is necessary and honorable ; trade is neces-
sary, but perilous to the soul; finance, if not immoral, is at
best sordid and at worst disreputable. This curious inver-
sion of the social values of more enlightened ages is best
revealed in medieval discussions of the ethics of commerce
The severely qualified tolerance extended to the trader was
partly, no doubt, a literary convention derived from clas-
sical models; it was natural that Aquinas should laud the
State which had small need of merchants because it could
meet its needs from the produce of its own soil; had not the
Philosopher himself praised aurapXeia. But it was a con-
vention which coincided with a vital element in medieval
social theory, and struck a responsive note in wide sections
of medieval society. It is not disputed, of course, that trade
is indispensable; the merchant supplements the deficiencies
of one country with the abundance of another. If there
were no private traders, argued Duns Scotus, whose indul-
gence was less carefully guarded, the governor would have
to engage them. Their profits, therefore, are legitimate,
and they may include, not only the livelihood appropriate
to the trader's status, but payment for labor, skill, and risk !S

The defence, if adequate, was somewhat embarrassing
For why should a defence be required? The insistence that
trade is not positively sinful conveys a hint that the practices
of traders may be, at least, of dubious propriety. And so, in
the eyes of most medieval thinkers, they are. Summe
periculosa est venditioms et emptionis negotiation The
explanation of that attitude lay partlv in the facts of con-

THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 37

temporary economic organization. The economy of the
medieval borough — consider only its treatment of food sup-
plies and prices — was one in which consumption held some-
what the same primacy in the public mind, as the undisputed
arbiter of economic effort, as the nineteenth century attached
to profits The merchant pure and simple, though con-
venient to the Crown, for whom he collected taxes and pro-
vided loans, and to great establishments such as monas-
teries, whose wool he bought in bulk, enjoyed the double
unpopularity of an alien and a parasite The best practical
commentary on the tepid indulgence extended by theorists
to the trader is the network of restrictions with which
medieval policy surrounded his activities, the recurrent
storms of public indignation against him, and the ruthless-
ness with which boroughs suppressed the middleman who
intei vened between consumer and producer.

Apart, however, from the color which it took from its
environment, medieval social theory had reasons of its own
for holding that business, as distinct from labor, required
some special justification The suspicion of economic mo-
tives had been one of the earliest elements in the social
teaching of the Church, and was to survive till Calvinism
endowed the life of economic enterprise with a new sancti-
fication. In medieval philosophy the ascetic tradition, which
condemned all commerce as the sphere of iniquity, was soft-
ened by a recognition of practical necessities, but it was not
obliterated, and, if reluctant to condemn, it was insistent
to warn. For it was of the essence of trade to drag into a
position of solitary prominence the acquisitive appetites; and
towards those appetites, which to most modern thinkers
have seemed the one sure social dynamic, the attitude of
the medieval theorist was that of one who holds a wolf by
the ears The craftsman labors for his living; he seeks
what is sufficient to support him, and no more. The mer-
chant aims, not merely at livelihood, but at profit. The tra-
ditional distinction was expressed in the words of Gratian:
"Whosoever buys a thing, not that he may sell it whole and
unchanged, but that it may be a material for fashioning
something, he is no merchant. But the man who buys it
in order that he may gain by selling it again unchanged
and as he bought it, that man is of the buyers and sellers
who are cast forth from God's temple." 40 By very defini-

38 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND

tion a man who "buys in order that he may sell dearer," the
trader is moved by an inhuman concentration on his own
pecuniary interest, unsoftened by any tincture of public
spirit or private charity. He turns what should be a means
into an end, and his occupation, therefore, "is justly con-
demned, since, regarded in itself, it serves the lust of
gain." 41

The dilemma presented by a form of enterprise at once
perilous to the soul and essential to society was revealed in
the solution most commonly propounded for it. It was to
treat profits as a particular case of wages, with the quali-
fication that gains in excess of a reasonable remuneration
for the merchant's labor were, though not illegal, reprehen-
sible as turpe lucrum. The condition of the trader's exon-
eration is that "he seeks gain, not as an end, but as the wages
of his labor." 42 Theoretically convenient, the doctrine was
difficult of application, for evidently it implied the accept-
ance of what the sedate irony of Adam Smith was later to
describe as "an affectation not very common among mer-
chants." But the motives which prompted it were character-
istic. The medieval theorist condemned as a sin precisely
that effort to achieve a continuous and unlimited increase
in material wealth which modern societies applaud as a
quality, and the vices for which he reserved his most mer-
ciless denunciations were the more refined and subtle of the
economic virtues. "He who has enough to satisfy his
wants," wrote a Schoolman of the fourteenth century, "and
nevertheless ceaselessly labors to acquire riches, either in
order to obtain a higher social position, or that subsequently
he may have enough to live without labor, or that his sons
may become men of wealth and importance — all such are in-
cited by a damnable avarice, sensuality, or pride " 45 Two
and a half centuries later, in the midst of a revolution in the
economic and spiritual environment, Luther, in even more
unmeasured language, was to say the same.44 The essence
of the argument was that payment may properly be de-
manded by the craftsmen who make the goods, or by the
merchants who transport them, for both labor in their voca-
tion and serve the common need. The unpardonable sin is
that of the speculator or the middleman, who snatches pri-
vate gain by the exploitation of public necessities. The true

THE SIN OF AVARICE 39

descendant of the doctrines of Aquinas is the labor theory
of value. The last of the Schoolmen was Karl Marx.

II THE SIN OF AVARICE

If such ideas were to be more than generalities, they re-
quired to be translated into terms of the particular transac-
tions by which trade is conducted and property acquired.
Their practical expression was the body of economic casuis-
try, in which the best-known elements are the teaching with
regard to the just price and the prohibition of usury.
These doctrines sprang as much from the popular conscious-
ness of the plain facts of the economic situation as from
the theorists who expounded them. The innumerable fa-
bles of the usurer who was prematurely carried to hell, or
whose money turned to withered leaves in his strong box,
or who (as the scrupulous recorder remarks), "about the
year 1240, " on entering a church to be married, was crushed
by a stone figure falling from the porch, which proved by
the grace of God to be a carving of another usurer and his
money-bags being carried off by the devil, are more illum-
inating than the refinements of lawyers 4~

On these matters, as the practice of borough and manor,
as well as of national governments, shows, the Church was
preaching to the converted, and to dismiss Its teaching on
economic ethics as the pious rhetoric of professional moral-
ists is to ignore the fact that precisely similar ideas were
accepted in circles which could not be suspected of any un-
natuial squeamishness as to the arts by which men grow
rich. The best commentary on ecclesiastical doctrines as
to usury and prices is the secular legislation on similar sub-
jects, for, down at least to the middle of the sixteenth cen-
tury, their leading ideas were reflected in it. Plain men
might curse 'the chicanery of ecclesiastical lawyers, and
gilds and boroughs might forbid their members to plead be-
fore ecclesiastical courts; but the rules which they them-
selves made for the conduct of business had more than a
flavor of the canon law. Florence was the financial capital
of medieval Europe; but even at Florence the secular au-
thorities fined bankers right and left for usury in the middle
of the fourteenth century, and, fifty years later, first prohib-
ited credit transactions altogether, and then imported Jews

40 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND

to conduct a business forbidden to Christians.46 Cologne was
one of the greatest of commercial entrepots, but, when its
successful business man came to make his will, he remem-
bered that trade was perilous to the soul and avarice a deadly
sin, and offered what atonement he could by directing his
sons to make restitution and to follow some less dangerous
occupation than that of the merchant.47 The burgesses of
Coventry fought the Prior over a question of common rights
for the best part of a century; but the Court Leet of that
thriving business city put usury on a par with adultery and
fornication, and decreed that no usurer could become mayor,
councillor, or master of the gild 4S It was not that laymen
were unnaturally righteous; it was not that the Church was
all-powerful, though its teaching wound into men's minds
through a hundred channels, and survived as a sentiment
long after it was repudiated as a command It was that the
facts of the economic situation imposed themselves irresist-
ibly on both In reality, there was no sharp collision between
the doctrine of the Church and the public policy of the
world of business — its individual practice was, of course,
another matter — because both were formed by the same en-
vironment, and accepted the same broad assumptions as to
social expediency.

The economic background of it all was very simple. The
medieval consumer — we can sympathize with him today
more easily than in 1914 — is like a traveller condemned to
spend his life at a station hotel. He occupies a tied house
and is at the mercy of the local baker and brewer Monop-
oly is inevitable. Indeed, a great part of medieval industry
is a system of organized monopolies, endowed with a public
status, which must be watched with jealous eyes to see that
they do not abuse their powers. It is a society of small mas-
ters and peasant farmers. Wages are not a burning question,
for, except in the great industrial centers of Italy and Flan-
ders, the permanent wage-earning class is small. Usury is,
as it is today in similar circumstances For loans are made
largely for consumption, not for production. The farmer
whose harvest fails or whose beasts die, or the artisan who
loses money, must have credit, seed-corn, cattle, raw mate-
rials, and his distress is the money-lender's opportunity.
Naturally, there is a passionate popular sentiment against
the engrosser who holds a town to ransom, the monopolist

THE SIN OF AVARICE 41

who brings the livings of many into the hands of one, the
money-lender who takes advantage of his neighbor's neces-
sities to get a lien on their land and foreclose. "The usurer
would not loan to men these goods, but if he hoped winning,
that he loves more than charity. Many other sins be more
than this usury, but for this men curse and hate it more
than other sin " 4q

No one who examines the cases actually heard by the
courts in the later Middle Ages will think that resentment
surprising, for they throw a lurid light on the possibilities
of commercial immorality r'° Among the peasants and small
masters who composed the mass of the population in me-
dieval England, borrowing and lending were common, and it
was with reference to their petty transactions, not to the
world of high finance, that the traditional attitude towards
the money-lender had been crystallized. It was natural that
ujuetta [who] is a usuress and sells at a dearer rate for ac-
commodation/' and John the Chaplain, qui est usurarius
maximns,''1 should be regarded as figures at once too scan-
dalous to be tolerated by their neighbors and too convenient
to be altogether suppressed. The Church accepts this pop-
ular sentiment, gives it a religious significance, and crystal-
lizes it in a system, in which economic morality is preached
from the pulpit, emphasized in the confessional, and en-
iorced, in the last resource, through the courts.

The philosophical basis of it is the conception of natural
law. ''Every law framed by man bears the character of a law
exactly to that extent to which it is derived from the law of
nature. But if on any point it is in conflict with the law of
nature, it at once ceases to be a law; it is a mere perversion
of law " r>J The plausible doctrine of compensations, of the
long run, of the self-correcting mechanism, has not yet been
invented The idea of a law of nature — of natural justice
which ought to find expression in positive law, but which is
not exhausted in it — supplies an ideal standard by which the
equity of particular relations can be measured. The most
fundamental difference between medieval and modern eco-
nomic thought consists, indeed, in the fact that, whereas the
latter normally refers to economic expediency, however it
may be interpreted, for the justification of any particular ac-
tion, policy, or system of organization, the former starts from
the position that there is a moral authority to which con-

42 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND

siderations of economic expediency must be subordinated.
The practical application of this conception is the attempt
to try every transaction by a rule of right, which is largely,
though not wholly, independent of the fortuitous combina-
tions of economic circumstances. No man must ask more
than the price fixed, either by public authorities, or, failing
that, by common estimation. True, prices even so will vary
with scarcity; for, with all their rigor, theologians are not so
impracticable as to rule out the effect of changing supplies.
But they will not vary with individual necessity or individ-
ual opportunity The bugbear is the man who uses, or even
creates, a temporary shortage, the man who makes money
out of the turn of the market, the man who, as Wyclif says,
must be wicked, or he could not have been poor yesterday
and rich today. 5i

The formal theory of the just price went, it is true, through
a considerable development The dominant conception of
Aquinas — that prices, though they will vary with the vary-
ing conditions of different markets, should correspond with
the labor and costs of the producer, as the proper basis of
the comrnums eslimatio, conformity with which was the
safeguard against extortion— was qualified by subsequent
writers. Several Schoolmen of the fourteenth century em-
phasized the subjective element in the common estimation,
insisted that the essence of value was utility, and drew the
conclusion that a fair price was most likely to be reached
under freedom of contract, since the mere fact that a bar-
gain had been struck showed that both parties were satis-
fied/'4 In the fifteenth century St. Antonino, who wrote with
a highly developed commercial civilization beneath his eyes,
endeavored to effect a synthesis, in which the principle of
the traditional doctrine should be observed, while the neces-
sary play should be left to economic motives After a subtle
analysis of the conditions affecting value, he concluded that
the fairness of a price could at best be a matter only of
"probability and conjecture," since it would vary with places,
periods and persons. His practical contribution was to intro-
duce a new elasticity into the whole conception by distin-
guishing three grades of prices — a gradus plus, discretus,
and rigidus. A seller who exceeded the price fixed by more
than 50 per cent, was bound, he argued, to make restitution,
and even a smaller departure from it, if deliberate, required

THE SIN OF AVARICE 43

atonement in the shape of alms. But accidental lapses were
venial, and there was a debatable ground within which prices
might move without involving sin.35

This conclusion, with its recognition of the impersonal
forces of the market, was the natural outcome of the intense
economic activity of the later Middle Ages, and evidently
contained the seeds of an intellectual revolution. The fact
that it should have begun to be expounded as early as the
middle of the fourteenth century is a reminder that the eco-
nomic thought of Schoolmen contained elements much more
various and much more modern than is sometimes suggested.
But the characteristic doctrine was different. It was that
which insisted on the just price as the safeguard against
extortion. "To leave the prices of goods at the discretion of
the sellers is to give rein to the cupiditv which goads almost
all of them to seek excessive gain " Prices must be such,
and no more than such, as will enable each man to "have
the necessaries of life suitable for his station " The most
desirable course is that they should be fixed by public offi-
cials, after making an enquiry into the supplies available
and framing an estimate of the requirements of different
classes. Failing that, the individual must fix prices for him-
self, guided by a consideration of "what he must charge in
order to maintain his position, and nourish himself suitably
in it, and by a reasonable estimate of his expenditure and
labor " r><) If the latter recommendation was a counsel of per-
fection, the former was almost a platitude It was no more
than an energetic mayor would carry out before breakfast.

No man, again, may charge money for a loan He may, of
course, take the profits of partnership, provided that he takes
the partner's risks. He may buy a rent-charge, for the fruits
of the earth are produced by nature, not wrung from man.
He may demand compensation — intcresse — if he is not re-
paid the principal at the time stipulated. He may ask pay-
ment corresponding to any loss he incurs or gain he foregoes.
He may purchase an annuity, for the payment is contingent
and speculative, not certain. It is no usury when John Deve-
neys, who has borrowed £19 16s., binds himself to pay a
penalty of £40 in the event of failure to restore the principal,
for this is compensation for damages incurred; or when
Geoffrey de Eston grants William de Burwode three marks of
silver in return for an annual rent of six shillings, for this is

44 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND

the purchase of a rent-charge, not a loan; or when James le
Reve of London advances £100 to Robert de Bree of Dublin,
merchant, with which to trade for two years in Ireland, for
this is a partnership ; or when the priority of Worcester sells
annuities for a capital sum paid down r>T What remained to
the end unlawful was that which appears in modern eco-
nomic text-books as "pure interest1' — interest as a fixed pay-
ment stipulated in advance for a loan of money or wares
without risk to the lender uUsura est ex mutuo lucrum
pacto debitum vel exactum . . quidquid sorti accedit,
subaudi per pactum vel exactionem, usura est, quodcunque
nomen sibi imponat " ~'s The emphasis was on pactum The
essence of usury was that it was certain, and that, whether
the borrower gained or lost, the usurer took his pound of
flesh Medieval opinion, which has no objection to rent or
profits, provided that they are reasonable — for is not every
one in a small way a profit-maker? — has no mercy for the
debenture-holder His crime is that he takes a payment for
money which is fixed and certain, and such a payment is
usury.

The doctrine was, of course, more complex and more
subtle than a bald summary suggests. With the growth of
the habit of investment, of a market for capital, and of new
forms of economic enterprise such as insurance and exchange
business, theory became steadily more elaborate and schools
more sharply divided. The precise meaning and scope of the
indulgence extended to the purchase of rent-charges produced
one controversy, the foreign exchanges another, the develop-
ment of Monts dc Pietc a third Even before the end of the
fourteenth century there had been writers who argued that
interest was the remuneration of the services rendered by
the lender, and who pointed out (though apparently they
did not draw the modern corollary) that present are more
valuable than future goods V) But on the iniquity of pay-
ment merely for the act of lending, theological opinion,
whether liberal or conservative, was unanimous, and its mod-
ern interpreter,60 who sees in its indulgence to intercsse
the condonation of interest, would have created a scandal in
theological circles in any age before that of Calvin To take
usury is contrary to Scripture; it is contrary to Aristotle;
it is contrary to nature, for it is to live without labor, it is
to sell time, which belongs to God, for the advantage of

THE SIN OF AVARICE 45

wicked men; it is to rob those who use the money lent, and
to whom, since they make it profitable, the profits should
belong, it is unjust in itself, for the benefit of the loan to
the borrower cannot exceed the value of the principal sum
lent him; it is in defiance of sound juristic principles, for
when a loan of money is made, the property in the thing
lent passes to the borrower, and why should the creditor
demand payment from a man who is merely using what is
now his own?

The part played by authority in all this is obvious. There
were the texts in Exodus and Leviticus; there was Luke vi.
35 — apparently a mistranslation; there was a passage in the
Politics, which some now say was mistranslated also.01 But
practical considerations contributed more to the doctrine
than is sometimes supposed. Its character had been given it
in an age in which most loans were not part of a credit sys-
tem, but an exceptional expedient, and in which it could be
said that "he who borrows is always under stress of neces-
sity." If usury were general, it was argued, "men would not
give thought to the cultivation of their land, except when
they could do nought else, and so there would be so great
a famine that all the poor would die of hunger; for even if
they could get land to cultivate, they would not be able to
get the beasts and implements for cultivating it, since the
poor themselves would not have them, and the rich, for the
sake both of profit and of security, would put their money
into usury rather than into smaller and more risky invest-
ments." 62 The man who used these arguments was not an
academic dreamer. He was Innocent IV, a consummate man
of business, a believer, even to excess, in Rcalpolitik, and
one of the ablest statesmen of his day.

True, the Church could not dispense with commercial
wickedness in high places. It was too convenient. The dis-
tinction between pawnbroking, which is disreputable, and
high finance, which is eminently honorable was as familiar
in the Age of Faith as in the twentieth century; and no
reasonable judgment of the medieval denunciation of usury
is possible, unless it is remembered that whole ranges of
financial business escaped from it almost altogether. It was
rarely applied to the large-scale transactions of kings, feudal
magnates, bishops and abbots. Their subjects, squeezed to
pay a foreign money-lender, might grumble or rebel, but, if

46 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND

an Edward TIT or a Count of Champagne was in the hands
of financiers, who could bring either debtor or creditor to
book? It was even more rarely applied to the Papacy itself,
Popes regularly employed the international banking houses
of the day, with a singular indifference, as was frequently
complained, to the morality of their business methods, took
them under their special protection, and sometimes enforced
the payment of debts by the threat of excommunication. As
a rule, in spite of some qualms, the international money-
market escaped from it , in the fourteenth century Italy was
full of banking-houses doing foreign exchange business in
every commercial center from Constantinople to London,
and in the great fairs, such as those of Champagne, a spe-
cial period was regularly set aside for the negotiation of
loans and the settlement of debts ° 5

It was not that transactions of this type were expressly
excepted, on the contrary, each of them from time to time
evoked the protests of moralists. Nor was it mere hypocrisy
which caused the traditional doctrine to be repeated by
writers who were perfectly well aware that neither commerce
nor government could be carried on without credit It was
that the whole body of intellectual assumptions and practical
interests, on which the prohibition of usury was based, had
reference to a quite different order of economic activities
from that represented by loans from great banking-houses
to the merchants and potentates who were their clients Its
object was simple and direct — to prevent the well-to-do
money-lender from exploiting the necessities of the peasant
or the craftsman; its categories, which were quite appro-
priate to that type of transaction, were those of personal
morality. It was in these commonplace dealings among small
men that oppression was easiest and its results most pitiable
It was for them that the Church's scheme of economic ethics
had been worked out, and with reference to them, though
set at naught in high places, it was meant to be enforced
for it was part of Christian charity.

It was enforced partly by secular authorities, partly, in
so far as the rivalry of secular authorities would permit it,
by the machinery of ecclesiastical discipline. The ecclesias-
tical legislation on the subject of usury has been so often
analyzed that it is needless to do more than allude to it.
Early Councils had forbidden usury to be taken by the
clergy.64 The Councils of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries

THE SIN OF AVARICE 47

forbid it to be taken by clergy or laity, and lay down rules
for dealing with offenders. Clergy who lend money to persons
in need, take their possession in pawn, and receive profits
beyond the capital sum lent, are to be deprived of their
office.Gr> Manifest usurers are not to be admitted to com-
munion or Christian burial; their offerings are not to be
accepted; and ecclesiastics who fail to punish them are to
be suspended until they make satisfaction to their bishop.66
The high-water mark of the ecclesiastical attack on usury
was probably reached in the legislation of the Councils of
Lyons (1274) and of Vienne (1312). The former re-enacted
the measures laid down by the third Lateran Council (1175),
and supplemented them by rules which virtually made the
money-lender an outlaw. No individual or society, under
pain of excommunication or interdict, was to let houses to
usurers, but was to expel them (had they been admitted)
within three months. They were to be refused confession,
absolution and Christian burial until they had made resti-
tution, and their wills were to be invalid/'7 The legislation
of the Council of Vienne was even more sweeping Declaring
that it has learned with dismay that there were communities
which, contrary to human and divine law, sanction usury
and compel debtors to observe usurious contracts, it declares
that all rulers and magistrates knowingly maintaining such
laws are to incur excommunication, and requires the legisla-
tion in question to be revoked within three months Since
the true nature of usurious transactions is often concealed
beneath various specious devices, money-lenders are to be
compelled by the ecclesiastical authorities to submit their
accounts to examination. Any person obstinately declaring
that usury is not a sin is to be punished as a heretic, and in-
quisitors are to proceed against him tanquam contra dif-
jamatos vcl suspectos de haeresi.(yB

It would not be easy to find a more drastic example,
either of ecclesiastical sovereignty, or of the attempt to assert
the superiority of the moral law to economic expediency,
than the requirement, under threat of excommunication, that
all secular legislation sanctioning usury shall be repealed.
But, for an understanding of the way in which the system
was intended to work, the enactments of Councils are per-
haps less illuminating than the correspondence between the
papal Curia and subordinate ecclesiastical authorities on
specific cases and questions of interpretation. Are the heirs

48 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND

of those who have made money by usury bound to make
restitution? Yes, the same penalties are to be applied to
them as to the original offenders. The pious object of ran-
soming prisoners is not to justify the asking of a price for
a loan A man is to be accounted a usurer, not only if he
charges interest, but if he allows for the element of time in
a bargain, by asking a higher price when he sells on credit
Even when debtors have sworn not to proceed against
usurers, the ecclesiastical authorities are to compel the lat
ter to restore their gains, and, if witnesses are terrorized by
the protection given to usurers by the powerful, punishment
can be imposed without their evidence, provided that the
offence is a matter of common notoriety An archbishop of
Canterbury is reminded that usury is perilous, not only for
the clergy, but for all men whatever, and is warned to use
ecclesiastical censures to secure the restoration, without the
deduction of interest, of property which has been pawned
Usurers, says a papal letter to the archbishop of Salerno,
object to restoring gains, or say that they have not the
means, he is to compel all who can to make restitution
either to those from whom interest was taken, or to their
heirs; when neither course is possible, they are to give it to
the poor; for, as Augustine says, non rcmittitur pcccatum,
nisi restituitur ablatum At Genoa, the Pope is informed, a
practice obtains of undertaking to pay, at the end of a given
term, a higher price for wares than they were worth at the
moment when the sale took place It is not clear that such
contracts are necessarily usurious, nevertheless, the sellers
run into sin, unless there is a probability that the wares will
have changed in value by the time that payment is made,
"and therefore your fellow-citizens would show a wise re-
gard for their salvation if they ceased making contracts of
the kind, since the thoughts of men cannot be concealed
from Almighty God." f><>

It is evident from the number of doubtful cases referred
to Rome for decision that the law with regard to usury was
not easily administered It is evident, also, that efforts were
made to offer guidance in dealing with difficult and technical
problems. In the book of common forms, drawn up in the
thirteenth century for the guidance of the papal penitentiary
in dealing with hard cases, precedents were inserted to show
how usurers should be handled.70 About the same time ap-
peared St. Raymond's guide to the duties of an archdeacon

THE SIN OF AVARICE 49

which contains a long list of inquiries to be made on visita-
tion, covering every conceivable kind of extortion, and de-
signed to expose the various illusory contracts — fictitious
partnerships, loans under the guise of sales, excessive de-
posits against advances — by which the offence was con-
cealed.71 Instructions to confessors define in equal detail the
procedure to be followed. The confessor, states a series of
synodal statutes, is to "make inquiry concerning merchan-
dising, and other things pertaining to avarice and covetous-
ness " Barons and knights are to be requested to state
whether they have made ordinances contrary to the liberty
of the Church, or refused justice to any man seeking it, or
oppressed their subjects with undue tallages, tolls or services.
"Concerning burgesses, merchants and officers (ministrales)
the priest is to make inquiry as to rapine, usury, pledges
made by deceit of usury, barratry, false and lying sales,
unjust weights and measures, lying, perjury and craft. Con-
cerning cultivators (agncolas] he is to inquire as to theft
and detention of the property of others, especially with re-
gard to tithes . . also as to the removing of landmarks
and the occupation of other men's land . . . Concerning
avarice it is to be asked in this wise, hast thou been guilty
of simony . an unjust judge ... a thief, a robber, a
perjurer, a sacrilegious man, a gambler, a remover of land-
marks in fields . . a false merchant, an oppressor of any
man and above all of widows, wards and others in misery,
for the sake of unjust and greedy gain?" Those guilty of
avarice are to do penance by giving large alms, on the prin-
ciple that "contraries are to be cured with contraries " But
there are certain sins for which no true penitence is possible
until restitution has been made Of these usury is one; and
usury, it is to be noted, includes, not only what would now
be called interest, but the sin of those who, on account of
lapse of time, sell dearer and buy cheaper. If for practical
reasons restitution is impossible, the offender is to be in-
structed to require that it shall be made by his heirs, and,
when the injured party cannot be found, the money is to
be spent, with the advice of the bishop if the sum is large
and of the priest if it is small, "on pious works and espe-
cially on the poor." 72

The more popular teaching on the subject is illustrated
by the manuals for use in the confessional and by books for
the guidance of the devout. The space given in them to the

50 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND

ethics of business was considerable. In the fifteenth century,
Bishop Pecock could meet the Lollards' complaint that the
Scriptures were buried beneath a mass of interpretation, by
taking as his illustration the books which had been written
on the text, "Lend, hoping for nothing again," and arguing
that all this teaching upon usury was little enough "to an-
swer ... all the hard, scrupulous doubts and questions
which all day have need to be assoiled in men's bargains
and chaff erings together." 73 A century later there were re-
gions in which such doctrine was still being rehearsed with
all the old rigor. In 1552 the Parliament which made the
Scottish Reformation was only eight years off. But the
catechism of the archbishop of St. Andrews, which was drawn
up in that year, shows no disposition to compromise with
the economic frailties of his fellow-countrymen. It denounces
usurers, masters who withhold wages, covetous merchants
who sell fraudulent wares, covetous landlords who grind
their tenants, and in general — a comprehensive and embar-
rassing indictment — "all wretches that will be grown rich
incontinent," and all "who may keep their neighbor from
poverty and mischance and do it not." 74

On the crucial question, how the ecclesiastical courts dealt
in practice with these matters, we have very little light
They are still almost an unworked field. On the Continent
we catch glimpses of occasional raids Bishops declare war
on notorious usurers, only to evoke reprisals from the secular
authorities, to whom the money-lender is too convenient to
be victimized by any one but themselves. 7r> At the end of
the thirteenth century an archbishop of Bourges makes some
thirty-five usurers disgorge at a sitting,70 and seventy years
later an inquistor at Florence collects 7,000 florins in two
years from usurers and blasphemers.77 In England commer-
cial morality was a debatable land, in which ecclesiastical
and secular authorities contended from time to time for
jurisdiction. The ecclesiastical courts claimed to deal with
cases of breach of contract in general, on the ground that
they involved laesio fidei, and with usury in particular, as
an offence against morality specifically forbidden by the
canon law. Both claims were contested by the Crown and
by municipal bodies. The former, by the Constitutions of
Clarendon,78 had expressly reserved proceedings as to debts
for the royal courts, and the same rule was laid down more
than once in the course of the next century. The latter again

THE SIN OF AVARICE 51

and again forbade burgesses to take proceedings in the courts
Christian, and fined those who disregarded the prohibition,79
Both, in spite of repeated protests from the clergy,80 made
good their pretension to handle usurious contracts in secular
courts, but neither succeeded in ousting the jurisdiction of
the Church The question at issue was not whether the
usurer should be punished — a point as to which there was
only one opinion — but who should have the lucrative busi-
ness of punishing him, and in practice he ran the gauntlet
of all and of each Local authorities, from the City of London
to the humblest manorial court, make by-laws against "un-
lawful chevisance" and present offenders against them.81
The Commons pray that Lombard brokers may be banished,
and that the ordinances of London concerning them may be
made of general application SJ The justices in eyre hear in-
dictments of usurers,8 ' and the Court of Chancery handles
petitions from victims who can get no redress at common
law 81 And Holy Church, though there seems to be only one
example of legislation on the subject by an English Church
Council/1 continues to deal with the usurer after her own
manner

For, in spite of the conflict of jurisdictions, the rising re-
sentment against the ways of ecclesiastical lawyers, and the
expanding capitalism of the later Middle Ages, it is evident
that commercial cases continued, on occasion at least, to
come before the courts Christian Nor, after the middle of
the fourteenth century, was their right to try cases of usury
contested by the secular authorities A statute of 1341 en-
acted that (as laid down long before) the King should have
cognizance of usurers dead, and the Church of usurers living.
The same reservation of ecclesiastical rights was repeated
when the question was taken up a century later under Henry
VII, and survived, an antiquated piece of common form,
even into the age of lusty capitalism under Elizabeth and
James I CG

That ecclesiastical authorities had much opportunity ^ of
enforcing the canon law in connection with money-lending
is improbable It was naturally in the commercial towns
that cases of the kind most frequently arose, and the towns
did not look with favor on the interference of churchmen in
matters of business. In London, collisions between the courts
of the Official, the Mayor and the King were frequent in
the early thirteenth century. Men took proceedings before

82 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND

the first, it seems, when a speedy decision was desired, or
when their case was of a kind which secular courts were not
likely to regard with favor. Thus craftsmen, to give one
curious example out of many, were evidently using the
courts Christian as a means of giving effect to trade union
regulations, which were more likely to be punished than
enforced by the mayor and aldermen, by the simple device
of imposing an oath and proceeding against those who broke
it for breach of faith. The smiths, for instance, made a
"confederacy," supported by an oath, with the object, as
they declared, of putting down night-work, but, as was al-
leged in court, of preventing any but members of their
organization from working at the trade, and summoned
blacklegs before the ecclesiastical courts. The spurriers for-
bade any one to work between sunset and sunrise, and haled
an offending journeyman before the archdeacon, with the re-
sult that "the said Richard, after being three times warned
by the Official, had been expelled from the Church and
excommunicated, until he would swear to keep the ordi-
nance." 87

Even at a later period the glimpses which we catch of the
activities of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction are enough to show
that it was not wholly a dead letter. Priests accused of usury
undergo correction at the hands of their bishops.88 Petition-
ers appeal for redress to the Court of Chancery on the
ground that they have failed to secure justice in the courts
of bishops or archdeacons, where actions on cases of debts
or usury have been begun before "spiritual men." 89 The
records of ecclesiastical courts show that, though sometimes
commercial questions were dismissed as belonging to the
secular courts, cases of breach of contract and usury con-
tinued, nevertheless, to be settled by them.<)() The disrep-
utable family of Marcroft — William the father was a com-
mon usurer, Alice his daughter baked bread at Penteco$4
and Edward his son made a shirt on All Saints' Day — is
punished by the ecclesiastical court of Whalley as it de-
serves.91 At Ripon a usurer and his victim are induced to
settle the case out of court €'2 The Commissary of London
cites Thomas Hall super crlmine usurariae pravitatis, on the
ground that, having advanced four shillings on the security
of Thomas Foster's belt, he had demanded twelve pence over
and above the principal, and suspends him when he does
not appear in court.93 Nor did business of this kind cease

THE SIN OF AVARICE S3

with the Reformation Cases of usury were being heard by
ecclesiastical courts under Elizabeth, and even in a great
commercial center like the City of London it was still pos-
sible in the reign of James I for the Bishop's Commissary
to be trying tradesmen for "lending up pawnes for an
excessive gain." <)4

It was not only by legal penalties, however, that an at-
tempt was made to raise a defensive barrier against the
exactions of the money-lender From a very early date there
was a school of opinion which held that, in view of the
various stratagems by which usurious contracts could be
"colored," direct prohibition was almost necessarily impo-
tent, and which favored the policy of providing facilities
for borrowing on more reasonable terms than could be ob-
tained from the money-lender Ecclesiastics try, in fact, to
turn the flank of the usurer by establishing institutions
where the poor can raise capital cheaply. Parishes, religious
fraternities, gilds, hospitals and perhaps monasteries lend
corn, cattle and money.')r> In England, bishops are organizing
such loans with papal approval in the middle of the thir-
teenth century,96 and two centuries later, about 1462, the
Franciscans lead the movement for the creation of Monts
dc Ptctc, which, starting in Italy, spread by the first half of
the sixteenth century to France, Germany, and the Low
Countries, and, though never taken up in England — for the
Reformation intervened — supplied a topic of frequent com-
ment and eulogy to English writers on economic ethics.97
The canon law on the subject of money-lending underwent
a steady development, caused by the necessity of adapting it
to the increasing complexity of business organization, down
at least to the Lateran Council of 1515 The ingenuity with
which professional opinion elaborated the code was itself a
proof that considerable business — and fees — were the result
of it, for lawyers do not serve God for naught The canon-
ists, who had a bad reputation with the laity, were not, to
put it mildly, more innocent than the other lawyers in the
gentle art of making business The Italians, in particular,
as was natural in the financial capital of Europe, made the
pace, and Italian canonists performed prodigies of legal in-
genuity. In England, on the other hand, either because
Englishmen were unusually virtuous, or, as a foreigner un-
kindly said, because "they do not fear to make contracts on
usury/' 98 or, most probably, because English business was

54 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND

a conservative and slow-going affair, the English canonist
Lyndwood is content to quote a sentence from an English
archbishop of the thirteenth century and to leave it at that."
But, however lawyers might distinguish and refine, the
essential facts were simple. The Church sees buying and
selling, lending and borrowing, as a simple case of neighborly
or unneighborly conduct. Though a rationalist like Bishop
Pecock may insist that the rich, as such, are not hateful to
God,100 it has a traditional prejudice against the arts by
which men — or at least laymen — acquire riches, and is apt
to lump them together under the ugly name of avarice.
Merchants who organize a ring, or money-lenders who grind
the poor, it regards, not as business strategists, but as
nejandae bdluae — monsters of iniquity. As for grocers and
victualers awho conspire wickedly together that none shall
sell better cheap than another," and speculators uwho buy
up corn, meat and wine ... to amass money at the cost
of others," they are "according to the laws of the Church
no better than common criminals " 1(n So, when the price of
bread rises, or when the London fruiterers, persuaded by one
bold spirit that they are "all poor and caitiffs on account
of their own simplicity, and if they would act on his advice
they would be rich and powerful," 10J form a combine, to
the great loss and hardship of the people, burgesses and
peasants do not console themselves with the larger hope that
the laws of supply and demand may bring prices down again
Strong in the approval of all good Christians, they stand the
miller in the pillory, and reason with the fruiterers in the
court of the mayor. And the parish priest delivers a sermon
on the sixth commandment, choosing as his text the words
of the Book of Proverbs, "Give me neither riches nor pov-
erty, but enough for my sustenance."

Ill THE IDEAL AND THE REALITY

Such, in brief outline, was the background of economic
thought which the sixteenth century inherited, and which
it brought to the bewildering changes in land tenure, in
prices, in commercial and financial organization, that made
the age a watershed in economic development. It is evident
that the whole implication of this philosophy was, on one
side, intensely conservative. There was no question of prog-
ress, still less of any radical social reconstruction. In the

THE IDEAL AND THE REALITY .5$

numerous heretical movements of the Middle Ages social
aspirations were often combined with criticisms of the luxury
and pomp of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The official Church,
to which independence of thought among the lower orders
was but little less abhorrent when it related to their tem-
poral well-being than when it was concerned with their
eternal salvation, frowned upon these dangerous speculations,
and sometimes crushed them with a ferocity as relentless a*
the most savage of the White Terrors of modern history has
shown to the most formidable of insurrections

Intellectually, religious opinion endorsed to the full the
static view, which regarded the social order as a thing un-
alterable, to be accepted, not to be improved Except on rare
occasions, its spokesmen repeated the conventional doctrine,
according to which the feet were born to labor, the hands to
fight, and the head to rule. Naturallv, therefore, they de-
nounced agitations, like the communal movement,103 de-
signed to overturn that natural order, though the rise of
the Free Cities was one of the glories of medieval Europe
and the germ of almost every subsequent advance in civil-
ization They referred to questions of economic conduct, not
because they were anxious to promote reforms, but because
they were concerned with the maintenance of traditional
standards of personal morality, of which economic conduct
formed an important part.

Practically, the Church was an immense vested interest,
implicated to the hilt in the economic fabric, especially on
the side of agriculture and land tenure. Itself the greatest
of landowners, it could no more quarrel with the feudal
structure than the Ecclesiastical Commission, the largest^ of
mineral owners today, can lead a crusade against royalties.
The persecution of the Spiritual Franciscans, who dared, in
defiance of the bull of John XXII, to maintain St. Francis'
rule as to evangelical poverty, suggests that doctrines im-
pugning the sanctity of wealth resembled too closely the
teaching of Christ to be acceptable to the orinces of the
Christian Church.

The basis of the whole medieval economic system, under
which, except in Italy and Flanders, more than nine-tenths
of the population consisted of agriculturists, had been serf-
dom or villeinage. Confronted in the sixteenth century with
the unfamiliar evils of competitive agriculture, conservative
reformers were to sigh for the social harmonies of a vanished

56 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND

age, which "knyt suche a knott of colaterall amytie betwene
the Lordes and the tenaunts that the Lorde tendered his
tenaunt as his childe, and the tenaunts againe loved and
obeyed the Lorde as naturellye as the childe the father." 1(H
Their idealization of the past is as misleading, as an account
of the conditions of previous centuries, as it is illuminating
as a comment upon those of their own. In reality, so far as
the servile tenants, who formed the bulk of medieval agri-
culturists, were concerned, the golden age of peasant pros-
perity is, except here and there, a romantic myth, at which
no one would have been more surprised than the peasants
themselves. The very essence of feudal property was ex-
ploitation in its most naked and shameless form, compulsory
labor, additional corvces at the very moments when the
peasant's labor was most urgently needed on his own hold-
ing, innumerable dues and payments, the obligation to grind
at the lord's mill and bake at the lord's oven, the private
justice of the lord's court. The custom of the manor, the
scarcity of labor, and, in England, the steadily advancing
encroachments of the royal courts, blunted the edge of the
system, and in fifteenth-century England a prosperous yeo-
manry was rising on its ruins But, during the greater part
of the Middle Ages, its cumulative weight had been, never-
theless, immense Those who lived under it had no illusions
as to its harshness The first step which the peasant who had
saved a little money took was to buy himself out of the obli-
gations to work on the lord's demesne. The Peasants' Re-
volt in England, the Jacqucne in France and the repeated
risings of the German peasantry reveal a state of social
exasperation which has been surpassed in bitterness by few
subsequent movements.

It is natural to ask (though some writers on medieval eco-
nomics refrain from asking) what the attitude of religious
opinion was towards serfdom. And it is hardly possible to an-
swer that question except by saying that, apart from a few
exceptional individuals, religious opinion ignored it True,
the Church condemned arbitrary tallages, and urged that the
serf be treated with humanity. True, it described the manu-
mission of serfs as an act of piety, like gifts to the poor. For
serfs are not "living tools/' but men; in the eyes of God all
men are serfs together, conservi, and in the Kingdom of
Heaven Lazarus is before Dives lor> True, villeinage was a
legal, not an economic category; in the England of the four-

THE IDEAL AND THE REALITY 57

teenth century there were serfs who were rich men. But to
release the individual is not to condemn the institution.
Whatever "mad priests" might say and do, the official
Church, whose wealth consisted largely of villeins, walked
with circumspection.

The canon law appears to have recognized and enforced
serfdom.100 Few prominent ecclesiastics made any pronounce-
ments against it. Aquinas explains it as the result of sin, but
that does not prevent his justifying it on economic grounds. IOT
Almost all medieval writers appear to assume it or excuse it.
Ecclesiastical landlords, though perhaps somewhat more con-
servative in their methods, seem as a whole to have been
neither better nor worse than other landlords. Rustica gens
optima flens, pessima gaud ens, was a sentiment which some-
times appealed, it is to be feared, to the children of light
concerned with rent rolls and farming profits, not less than
to the feudal aristocracy, with whom the heads of the ecclesi-
astical hierarchy were inextricably intermingled. When their
chance came, John Nameless, and John the Miller, and John
Carter, who may be presumed to have known their friends,
burned the court rolls of an abbot of St Albans, and cut off
the head of an archbishop, and ran riot on the estates of an
abbot of Kempten, with not less enthusiasm than they
showed in plundering their lay exploiters. It was not the
Church, but revolting peasants in Germany and England,
who appealed to the fact that "Christ has made all men
free",los and in Germany, at least, their ecclesiastical masters
showed small mercy to them. The disappearance of serfdom
— and, after all, it did not disappear from France till late in
the eighteenth century, and from Germany till the nineteenth
— was part of a general economic movement, with which the
Church had little to do, and which churchmen, as property-
owners, had sometimes resisted. It owed less to Christianity
than to the humanitarian liberalism of the French Revo-
lution.

The truth was that the very triumph of the Church closed
its mouth. The Church of the third century, a minority of
believers confronted with an alien civilization, might protest
and criticize. But, when the whole leaven was mixed with the
lump, when the Church was regarded, not as a society, but as
society itself, it was inevitably diluted by the mass which it
absorbed. The result was a compromise — a compromise of

58 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND

which the critic can say, "How much that was intolerable
was accepted! " and the eulogist, "How much that was intol-
erable was softened!"

Both critic and eulogist are right. For if religious opinion
acquiesced in much, it also claimed much, and the habit of
mind which made the medieval Church almost impotent when
dealing with the serried abuses of the medieval land system
was precisely that which made it strong, at least in theory, in
dealing with the economic transactions of the individual. In
the earlier Middle Ages it had stood for the protection of
peaceful labor, for the care of the poor, the unfortunate and
the oppressed — for the ideal, at least, of social solidarity
against the naked force of violence and oppression. With the
growing complexity of economic civilization, it was confront-
ed with problems not easily handled by its traditional cate-
gories. But, if applied capriciously, they were not renounced,
and the world of economic morality, which baffles us today,
was in its turn converted by it into a new, though embar-
rassing, opportunity. Whatever emphasis may be laid — and
emphasis can hardly be too strong — upon the gulf between
theory and practice, the qualifications stultifying principles,
and the casuistry by which the work of canonists, not less
than of other lawyers, was disfigured, the endeavor to draw
the most commonplace of human activities and the least trac-
table of human appetites within the all-embracing circle of
a universal system still glows through it all with a certain
tarnished splendor. When the distinction between that which
is permissible in private life and that which is permissible
in business offers so plausible an escape from the judgment
pronounced on covetousness, it is something to have insisted
that the law of charity is binding on the second not less
than on the first WThen the austerity of principles can be
evaded by treating them as applicable only to those relations
of life in which their application is least exacting, it is some-
thing to have attempted to construct a system tough enough
to stand against commercial unscrupulousness, but yet suffi-
ciently elastic to admit any legitimate transaction. If it is
proper to insist on the prevalence of avarice and greed in high
places, it is not less important to observe that men called
these vices by their right names, and had not learned to per-
suade themselves that greed was enterprise and avarice
economy.

Such antitheses are tempting, and it is not surprising that

THE IDEAL AND THE REALITY 59

some writers should have dwelt upon them. To a generation
disillusioned with free competition, and disposed to demand
some criterion of social expediency more cogent than the ver-
dict of the market, the jealous and cynical suspicion of eco-
nomic egotism, which was the prevalent mood of the Middle
Ages, is more intelligible than it was to the sanguine opti-
mists of the Age of Reason, which, as far as its theory of the
conduct of men in society is concerned, deserves much more
than the thirteenth century to be described as the Age of
Faith. In the twentieth century, with its trusts and combines,
its control of industry by business and of both by finance, its
attempts to fix fair wages and fair prices, its rationing and
food controls and textile controls, the economic harmonies
are, perhaps, a little blown upon. The temper in which it ap-
proaches questions of economic organization appears to have
more affinity with the rage of the medieval burgess at the
uncharitable covetousness of the usurer and the engrosser,
than it has with the confidence reposed by its innocent grand-
fathers in the infallible operations of the invisible hand.

The resemblance, however, though genuine, is superficial,
and to overemphasize it is to do less than justice to precisely
those elements in medieval thought which were most charac-
teristic. The significance of its contribution consists, not in
its particular theories as to prices and interest, which recur
in all ages, whenever the circumstances of the economic en-
vironment expose consumer and borrower to extortion, but in
its insistence that society is a spiritual organism, not an eco-
nomic machine, and that economic activity, which is one sub-
ordinate element within a vast and complex unity, requires
to be controlled and repressed by reference to the moral ends
for which it supplies the material means. So merciless is the
tyranny of economic appetites, so prone to self-aggrandize-
ment the empire of economic interests, that a doctrine which
confines them to their proper sphere, as the servant, not the
master, of civilization, may reasonably be regarded as among
the pregnant truisms which are a permanent element in any
sane philosophy. Nor it it, perhaps, as clear today as it
seemed a century ago, that it has been an unmixed gain to
substitute the criterion of economic expediency, so easily in-
terpreted in terms of quantity and mass, for the conception
of a rule of life superior to individual desires and temporary
exigencies, which was what the medieval theorist meant by
"natural law."

60 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND

When all is said, the fact remains that, on the small scale
involved, the problem of moralizing economic life was faced
and not abandoned. The experiment may have been imprac-
ticable, and almost from the first it was discredited by the
notorious corruption of ecclesiastical authorities, who
preached renunciation and gave a lesson in greed. But it had
in it something of the heroic, and to ignore the nobility of the
conception is not less absurd than to idealize its practical re-
sults. The best proof of the appeal which the attempt to sub-
ordinate economic interests to religion had made is the per-
sistence of the same attempt among reformers, to whom the
Pope was anti-Christ and the canon law an abomination and
the horror of decent men when, in the sixteenth century, its
breakdown became too obvious to be contested.

CHAPTER II

The Continental Reformers

"Neither the Church of Christ, nor a Christian Commonwealth,
ought to tolerate such as prefer private gam to the public weal, or
seek it to the hurt of their neighbours "

BuctR, De Rcgno Christi.

LORD ACTON, in an unforgettable passage in his Inaugural
Lecture on the Study of History, has said that "after many
ages persuaded of the headlong decline and impending disso-
lution of society, and governed by usage and the will of mas-
ters who were in their graves, the sixteenth century went
forth armed for untried experience, and ready to watch with
hopefulness a prospect of incalculable change." 1 His refer-
ence was to the new world revealed by learning, by science,
and by discovery But his words offer an appropriate text
for a discussion of the change in the conception of the rela-
tions between religion and secular interests which took place
in the same period. Its inevitable consequence was the emer-
gence, after a prolonged moral and intellectual conflict, of
new conceptions of social expediency and of new lines of
economic thought.

The strands in this movement were complex, and the for-
mula which associates the Reformation with the rise of eco-
nomic individualism is no complete explanation Systems pre-
pare their own overthrow by a preliminary process of petri-
faction The traditional social philosophy was static, in the
sense that it assumed a body of class relations sharply de-
fined by custom and law, and little affected by the ebb and
flow of economic movements Its weakness in the face of
novel forces was as obvious as the strain put upon it by the
revolt against the source of ecclesiastical jurisprudence, the
partial discredit of the canon law and of ecclesiastical disci-
pline, and the rise of a political science equipped from the
arsenals of antiquity But it is not to under-estimate the ef-
fect of the Reformation to say that the principal causes mak-
ing the age a watershed, from which new streams of social
theory descend, lay in another region Mankind does not re-
flect upon questions of economic and social organization un-
til compelled to do so by the sharp pressure of some practical

61

62 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS

emergency. The sixteenth century was an age of social spec-
ulation for the same reason as the early nineteenth — because
it was an age of social dislocation. The retort of conservative
religious teachers to a spirit which seems to them the triumph
of Mammon produces the last great literary expression of the
appeal to the average conscience which had been made by an
older social order. The practical implications of the social
theory of the Middle Ages are stated more clearly in the six-
teenth century than even in its zenith, because they are stated
with the emphasis of a creed which is menaced.

I. THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION

The religious revolution of the age came on a world heav-
ing with the vastest economic crisis that Europe had experi-
enced since the fall of Rome. Art and scientific curiosity
and technical skill, learning and statesmanship, the scholar-
ship which explored the past and the prophetic vision which
pierced the future, had all poured their treasures into the
sumptuous shrine of the new civilization. Behind the genii of
beauty and wisdom who were its architects there moved a
murky, but indispensable, figure. It was the demon whom
Dante had met muttering gibberish in the fourth circle of the
Inferno, and whom Sir Guyon was to encounter three cen-
turies later, tanned with smoke and seared with fire, in a cave
adjoining the mouth of hell His uncouth labors quarried the
stones which Michael Angelo was to raise, and sank deep in
the Roman clay the foundations of the walls to be adorned
by Raphael.

For it was the mastery of man over his environment which
heralded the dawn of the new age, and it was in the stress
of expanding economic energies that this mastery was proved
and won. Like sovereignty in a feudal society, the economic
efforts of the Middle Ages, except in a few favored spots, had
been fragmentary and decentralized. Now the scattered raid-
ers were to be organized and disciplined; the dispersed and
irregular skirmishes were to be merged in a grand struggle,
on a front which stretched from the Baltic to the Ganges and
from the Spice Islands to Peru. Every year brought the news
of fresh triumphs. The general who marshaled the host and
launched the attack was economic power.

Economic power, long at home in Italy, was leaking
through a thousand creeks and inlets into western Europe, for

THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION 63

a century before, with the climax of the great Discoveries,
the flood came on breast-high Whatever its truth as a judg-
ment on the politics of the fifteenth century, the conventional
verdict on its futility does scanty justice to its economic sig-
nificance It was in an age of political anarchy that the forces
destined to dominate the future tried their wings. The era of
Columbus and Da Gama was prepared by the patient labor
of Italian cartographers and Portuguese seamen, as certainly
as was that of Crompton and Watt by the obscure experi-
ments of nameless predecessors.

The master who set the problem that the heroes of the age
were to solve was material necessity The Europe of the ear-
liei Middle Ages, like the world of the twentieth century, had
been a closed circle But it had been closed, not by the
growth of knowledge, but by the continuance of ignorance;
and, while the latter, having drawn the whole globe into a
single economic system, has no space left for fresh expan-
sion, for the former, with the Mediterranean as its immemo-
rial pivot, expansion had hardly begun Tapping the wealth
of the EaM: by way of the narrow apertures in the Levant, it
resembled, in the rigidity of the limits imposed on its com-
mercial strategy, a giant fed through the chinks of a wall.

As was the general scheme, so were the details, inelastic in
its external Europe was hardly more flexible in its internal,
relations Its primary unit had been the village; and the vil-
lage, a community of agrarian shareholders fortified by cus-
tom, had repressed with a fury of virtuous unanimity the dis-
orderly appetites whi( h menaced its traditional routine with
the evil whose name is Change Beyond the village lay the
greater, more privileged, village called the borough, and the
brethren of borough and gild had turned on the foreign devil
from upland and valley a face of flint Above both were the
slowly waking nations Nationalism was an economic force
before nationality was a political fact, and it was a sound
reason for harrying a competitor that he was a Florentine or
a man of the E'mperor The privileged colonv with its depot,
the Steel-yard of the Hanseatic League, the Fondaco Tedesco
of the south Germans, the Factory of the English Merchant
Adventurers, were but tiny breaches in a wall of economic
exclusiveness Trade, as in modern Turkey or China, was
carried on under capitulations.

This narrow framework had been a home. In the fifteenth
century it was felt to be a prison. Expanding energies pressed

64 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS

against the walls; restless appetites gnawed and fretted
wherever a crack in the surface offered room for erosion.
Long before the southward march of the Turks cut the last
of the great routes from the East, the Venetian monopoly was
felt to be intolerable. Long before the plunder of Mexico and
the silver of Potosi flooded Europe with treasure, the mines
of Germany and the Tyrol were yielding increasing, if still
slender, streams of bullion, which stimulated rather than al-
]a}'ed its thirst.2 It was not the lords of great estates, but
eager and prosperous peasants, who in England first nibbled
at commons and undermined the manorial custom, behind
which, as behind a dyke, their small savings had been accu-
mulated. It was not great capitalists, but enterprising gilds-
men, who began to make the control of the fraternity the
basis of a system of plutocratic exploitation, or who fled, pre-
cocious individualists, from the fellowship of borough and
craft, that they might grow to what stature they pleased in
rural isolation. It was not even the Discoveries which first
began the enormous tilt of economic power from south and
east to north and west The records of German and English
trade suggest that the powers of northern Europe had for a
century before the Discoveries been growing in wealth and
civilization, s and for a century after them English economic
development was to be as closely wedded to its continental
connections as though Diaz had never rounded the Cape, nor
Columbus praised Heaven for leading him to the shores of
Zayton and Guinsay First attempted as a counterpoise to the
Italian monopolist, then pressed home with ever greater ea-
gerness to turn the flank of the Turk, as his strangle-hold on
the eastern commerce tightened, the Discoveries were neither
a happy accident nor the fruit of the disinterested curiosity
of science. They were the climax of almost a century of pa-
tient economic effort. They were as practical in their motive
as the steam-engine.

The result was not the less sensational because it had been
long prepared. Heralded by an economic revolution not less
profound than that of three centuries later, the new world
of the sixteenth century took its character from the outburst
of economic energy in which it had been born. Like the nine-
teenth century, it saw a swift increase in wealth and an im-
pressive expansion of trade, a concentration of financial pow-
er on a scale unknown before, the rise, amid fierce social con-
vulsions, of new classes and the depression of old, the tri-

THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION 65

umph of a new culture and system of ideas amid struggles
not less bitter.

It was an age of economic, not less than of political, sensa-
tions, which were recorded in the letter-books4 of business
men as well as in the state papers of Governments. The de-
cline of Venice and of the south German cities which had
distributed the products that Venice imported, and which
henceforward must either be marooned far from the new
trade routes or break out to the sea, as some of them did, by
way of the Low Countries; the new economic imperialism of
Portugal and Spain, the outburst of capitalist enterprise in
mining and textiles, the rise of commercial companies, no
longer local but international, and based, not merely on ex-
clusive privileges, but on the power of massed capital to drive
from the field all feebler competitors; a revolution in prices
which shattered all customary relationships, the collapse of
medieval rural society in a nightmare of peasants' wars; the
subjection of the collegiate industrial organization of the
Middle Ages to a new money-power, the triumph of the
State and its conquest, in great parts of Europe, of the
Church — all were crowded into less than two generations. A
man who was born when the Council of Basel was sitting
saw also, if he lived to a ripe old age, the dissolution of the
English monasteries At the first date Portuguese explorers
had hardly passed Sierra Leone; at the second Portugal had
been the master of an Indian Empire for almost a generation.
In the intervening three-quarters of a century the whole
framework of European civilization had been transformed.

Compared with the currents which raced in Italy, or Ger-
many, or the Low Countries, English life was an economic
back-water. But even its stagnant shallows were stirred by
the eddy and rush of the continental whirlpool. When Henry
VII came to the throne, the economic organization of the
country differed but little from that of the age of Wyclif.
When Henry VIII died, full of years and sin, some of the
main characteristics which were to distinguish it till the ad-
vent of steam-power and machinery could already, though
faintly, be descried. The door that remained to be unlocked
was colonial expansion, and forty years later the first experi-
ments in colonial expansion had begun.

The phenomenon which dazzled contemporaries was the
swift start into apparent opulence, first of Portugal and then

66 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS

of Spain. The nemesis of parasitic wealth was not discerned,
and it was left for the cynical rationalism of an ambassador
of that commercial republic, in comparison with whose hoary
wisdom the new plutocrats of the West were meddlesome
children, to observe that the true mines of the Spanish Em-
pire lay, not in America, but in the sodden clay of the water-
logged Netherlands 5 The justice of the criticism was revealed
when Spain, a corpse bound on the back of the most liberal
and progressive community of the age, completed her own
ruin by sacking the treasury from which, far more than from
Potosi, her wealth had been drawn. But the beginnings of
that long agony, in which the powerhouse of European ente'-
prise was to be struck with paralysis, still lay in the future,
and later generations of Spaniards looked back with pardon-
able exaggeration on the closing years of Charles V as a
golden age of economic prosperity Europe as a whole, how-
ever lacerated by political and religious struggles, seemed to
have solved the most pressing economic problems which had
haunted her in the later Middle Ages. During a thousand
years of unresting struggle with marsh and forest and moor
she had colonized her own waste places That tremendous
achievement almost accomplished, she now turned to the
task of colonizing the world No longer on the defensive, she
entered on a phase of economic expansion which was to grow
for the next four hundred years, and which only in the twen-
tieth century was to show signs of drawing towards its close
Once a year she was irrigated with the bullion of America,
once a year she was enriched with a golden harvest from tho
East. The period of mere experiment over, and the new con-
nections firmly established, she appeared to be in sight of an
economic stability based on broader foundations than ever
before.

Portugal and Spain held the keys of the treasure-house of
East and West But it was not Portugal, with her tiny pop-
ulation, and her empite that was little more than a line of
forts and factories 10,000 miles long, nor Spain, for centuries
an army on the march, and now staggering beneath the re-
sponsibilities of her vast and scattered empire, devout to fa-
naticism, and with an incapacity for economic affairs which
seemed almost inspired, who reaped the material harvest of
the empires into which they had stepped, the one by patient
toil, the other by luck. Gathering spoils which they could not
retain, and amassing wealth which slipped through their fin-

THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION 6?

gers, they were little more than the political agents of minds
more astute and characters better versed in the arts of peace.
Every period and society has some particular center, or in-
stitution, or social class, in which the characteristic qualities
of its genius seem to be fixed and embodied. In the Europe of
the early Renaissance the heart of the movement had been
Italy. In the Europe of the Reformation it was the Low Coun
tries. The economic capital of the new civilization was Ant-
werp The institution which best symbolized its eager ener-
gies was the international money-market and produce-ex-
change. Its typical figure, the paymaster of princes, was the
international financier.

Before it was poisoned by persecution, revolution and war,
the spirit of the Netherlands found its purest incarnation in
Erasmus, a prophet without sackcloth and a reformer un-
touched by heat or fury, to the universal internationalism of
whose crystal spirit the boundaries of States were a pattern
scrawled to amuse the childish malice of princes Of that cos-
mopolitan country, destined to be the refuge of the interna-
tional idea when outlawed by every other power in Europe
Antwerp, "a home common to all nations/' was the most
cosmopolitan city. Made famous as a center of learning by
Plantings press, the metropolis of painting in a country where
painting was almost a national industry, it was at once the
shrine to which masters like Cranach, Durer and Holbein
made their pilgrimage of devotion, and an asylum which
offered to the refugees of less happy countries a haven as yet
undisturbed by any sy^ematic campaign to stamp out heresy.
In the exuberance of its intellectual life, as in the glitter of
its material prosperity, the thinker and the reformer found
a spiritual home, where the energies of the new age seemed
gathered for a bound into that land of happiness and
dreams, for the scene of which More, who knew his Europe
chose as the le*st incredible setting the garden of his lodg
ings at Antwerp.

The economic preeminence of Antwerp owed much to the
industrial region behind it, from which the woollen and wor-
steds of Valenciennes and Tournai, the tapestries of Brussels
and Oudenarde, the iron of Namur, annd the munitions^ of
the Black Country round Liege, poured in an unceasing
stream on to its quays 6 But Antwerp was a European, rather
than a Flemish, metropolis. Long the competitor of Bruges
for the reception of the two great currents of trade from the

68 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS

Mediterranean and the Baltic, which met in the Low Coun-
tries, by the last quarter of the fifteenth century she had
crushed her rival. The Hanse League maintained a depot at
Antwerp; Italian banking firms in increasing numbers opened
businesses there; the English Merchant Adventurers made it
the entrepot through which English cloth, long its principal
import, was distributed to northern Europe, the copper mar-
ket moved from Venice to Antwerp in the nineties Then
came the great Discoveries, and Antwerp, the first city to tap
the wealth, not of an inland sea, but of the ocean, stepped
into a position of unchallenged preeminence almost unique
in European history. The long sea-roads which ran east and
west met and ended in its harbors. The Portuguese Govern-
ment made it in 1503 the depot of the Eastern spice trade
From the accession of Charles V it was the commercial cap-
ital of the Spanish Empire, and, in spite of protests that the
precious metals were leaving Spain, the market for American
silver. Commerce, with its demand for cheap and easy cred-
it, brought finance in its train. The commercial companies
and banking houses of south Germany turned from the dwin-
dling trade across the Alps, to make Antwerp the base for
financial operations of unexampled magnitude and com-
plexity.7

In such an economic forcing-house new philosophies of so-
ciety, like new religious creeds, found a congenial soil Pro-
fessor Pirenne has contrasted the outlook for the medieval
middle class, intent on the conservation of corporate and lo-
cal privileges, with that of the new plutocracy of the six-
teenth century, with its international ramifications, its inde-
pendence of merely local interests, its triumphant vindication
of the power of the capitalist to dispense with the artificial
protection of gild and borough and carve his own career.8
"No one can deny," wrote the foreign merchants at Antwerp
to Phillip II, in protest against an attempt to interfere with
the liberty of exchange transactions, "that the cause of the
prosperity of this city is the freedom granted to those who
trade there " '* Swept into wealth on the crest of a wave of
swiftly expanding enterprise, which a century before would
have seemed the wildest of fantasies, the liberal bourgeosie
of Antwerp pursued, in the teeth of all precedents, a policy
of practical individualism, which would have been met in any
other city by rebellion, making terms with the levelling en-
croachments of the Burgundian monarchy, which were fought

THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION 69

by their more conservative neighbors, lowering tariffs and ex-
tinguishing private tolls, welcoming the technical improve-
ments which elsewhere were resisted, taming the turbulent
independence of the gilds, and throwing open to alien and
citizen alike the new Exchange, with its significant dedica-
tion: Ad usum mercatorum cuiusquc gentis ac linguae.

For, if Antwerp was the microcosm which reflected the
soul of commercial Europe, the heart of Antwerp was its
Bourse. The causes which made financial capitalism as char-
acteristic of the age of the Renaissance, as industrial capital-
ism was to be of the nineteenth century, consisted partly in
the mere expansion in the scale of commercial enterprise. A
steady flow of capital was needed to finance the movement
of the produce handled on the world-market, such as the
eastern spice crop— above all pepper, which the impecunious
Portuguese Government sold in bulk, while it was still on the
water, to German syndicates — copper, alum, the precious
metals, and the cloth shipped by the English Merchant Ad-
venturers. The cheapening of bullion and the rise in prices
welled the profits seeking investment; the growth of an in-
ternational banking system mobilized immense resources at
the strategic points; and, since Antwerp was the capital of
the European money-market, the bill on Antwerp was the
commonest form of international currency. Linked together
by the presence in each of the great financial houses of the
Continent, with liquid funds pouring in from mines in Hun-
gary and the Tyrol, trading ventures in the East, taxes wrung
from Spanish peasants, speculations on the part of financiers,
and savings invested by the general public, Antwerp, Lyons,
Frankfurt and Venice, and, in the second rank, Rouen,
Strassburg, Seville and London, had developed by the middle
of the century a considerable class of financial specialists,
and a financial technique, identical, in all essentials, with
that of the present day. They formed together the depart-
ments of an international clearing-house, where bills could
be readily discounted, drafts on any important city could be
obtained, and the paper of merchants of almost every na-
tionality changed hands.10

Nourished by the growth of peaceful commerce, the finan-
cial capitalism of the age fared not less sumptuously, if more
dangerously, at the courts of princes Mankind, it seems,
hates nothing so much as its own prosperity. Menaced with
an accession of riches which would lighten its toil, it makes

70 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS

haste to redouble its labors, and to pour away the perilous
stuff, whcih might deprive of plausibility the complaint that
it is poor. Applied to the arts of peace, the new resources
commanded by Europe during the first half of the sixteenth
century might have done something to exorcise the specters
of pestilence and famine, and to raise the material fabric of
civilization to undreamed-of heights Its rulers, secular and
ecclesiastical alike, thought otherwise When pestilence and
famine were ceasing to be necessities imposed by nature, they
reestablished them by political art

The sluice which they opened to drain away each new ac-
cession of superfluous wealth was war. ct()f all birds," wrote
the sharpest pen of the age, uthe eagle alone has seemed to
wise men the type of royalty — not beautiful, not musical,
not fit for food, but carnivorous, greedy, hateful to all, the
curse of all, and, with its great powers of doing harm, sur-
passing them all in its desire of doing it " n The words of
Erasmus, uttered in 1517, were only too prophetic For ap-
proximately three-quarters both of the sixteenth and of the
seventeenth centuries, Europe tore itself to pieces In the
course of the conflict the spiritual fires of Renaissance and
Reformation alike were trampled out beneath the feet of bra-
vos as malicious and mischievous as the vain, bloody-minded
and futile generals who strut and posture, to the hateful
laughter of Thersites, in the most despairing of Shakespeare's
tragedies By the middle of the sixteenth century the English
Government, after an orgy of debasement and confiscation,
was in a state of financial collapse, and by the end of it
Spain, the southern Netherlands including Antwerp, and a
great part of France, including the financial capital of south-
ern Europe, Lyons, were ruined. By the middle of the seven-
teenth century wide tracts of Germany were a desert, and by
the end of it the French finances had relapsed into worse
confusion than that from which they had been temporarily
rescued by the genius of Colbert. The victors compared their
position with that of the vanquished, and congratulated
themselves on their spoils It rarely occurred to them to ask
what it would have been, had there been neither victors nor
vanquished, but only peace

It is possible that the bankruptcies of Governments have,
on the whole, done less harm to mankind than their ability
to raise loans, and the mobilization of economic power on a
scale unknown before armed the fierce nationalism of the age

THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION 71

with a weapon more deadly than gunpowder and cannon. The
centralized States which were rising in the age of the Renais-
sance were everywhere faced with a desperate financial sit-
uation. It sprang from the combination of modern adminis-
trative and military methods with medieval systems of
finance. They entrusted to bureaucracies work which, if done
at all, had formerly been done as an incident of tenure, or by
boroughs and gilds; officials had to be paid. They were con-
stantly at war, and the new technique of war, involving the
use of masses of professional infantry and artillery — which
Rabelais said was invented by the inspiration of the devil, as
a counterpoise to the invention of printing inspired by God —
was making it, after 1870, a highly capitalized industry.
Government after Government, undeterred, with rare excep-
tions, by the disasters of its neighbors, trod a familiar round
of expedients, each of which was more disastrous than the
last. They hoarded treasure, only to see the accumulations
of a thrifty Henry VII or Frederick III dissipated by a Henry
VIII or a Maximilian. They debased the currency and ruined
trade They sold offices, or established monopolies, and
crushed the taxpayer beneath a load of indirect taxation.
They plundered the Church, and spent gorgeously as income
property which should have been treated as capital. They
parted with Crown estates, and left an insoluble problem to
their successors.

These agreeable devices had, however, obvious limits.
What remained, when they were exhausted, was the money-
market, and to the rulers of the money-market sooner or later
all States came Their dependence on the financier was thnt
of an Ismail or an Abdul, and its results were not less disas-
trous. Naturally, the City interest was one of the great Pow-
ers of Europe. Publicists might write that the new Messiah
was the Prince, and reformers that the Prince was Pope. But
behind Prince and Pope alike, financing impartially Henry
VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth, Francis, Charles and Philip,
stood in the last resort a little German banker, with branches
in every capital in Europe, who played in the world of fi-
nance the part of the condottieri in war, and represented in
the economic sphere the morality typified in that of politics
by Machiavelli's Prince. Compared with these financial dy-
nasties, Hapsburgs, Valois and Tudors were puppets dancing
on wires held by a money-power to which political struggles
were irrelevant except as an opportunity for gain.

72 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS

The financier received his payment in cash, partly in con-
cessions, which still further elaborated the network of finan-
cial connections that were making Europe an economic unity.
The range of interests in which the German banking houses
were involved is astonishing. The Welsers had invested in
the Portuguese voyage of 1505 to the East Indies, financed
an expedition, half commercial, half military, to Venezuela
in 1527, were engaged in the spice trade between Lisbon,
Antwerp and south Germany, were partners in silver and
copper mines in the Tyrol and Hungary, and had establish-
ments, not only at Lisbon and Antwerp, but in the principal
cities of Germany, Italy and Switzerland The careers of the
Hochstetters, Haugs, Meutings and Tmhofs were much the
same. The Fuggers, thanks to judicious loans to Maximilian,
had acquired enormous concessions of mineral property,
farmed a large part of the receipts drawn by the Spanish
Crown from its estates, held silver and quicksilver mines in
Spain, and controlled banking and commercial businesses in
Italy, and, above all, at Antwerp. They advanced the money
which made Albrecht of Brandenburg archbishop of Mainz;
repaid themselves by sending their agent to accompany Tet-
zel on his campaign to raise money by indulgences and tak-
ing half the proceeds; provided the funds with which Charles
V bought the imperial crown, after an election conducted
with the publicity of an auction and the morals of a gambling
hell; browbeat him, when the debt was not paid, in the tone
of a pawnbroker rating a necessitous client; and found the
money with which Charles raised troops to fight the Prot-
estants in 1552 The head of the firm built a church and en-
dowed an almshouse for the aged poor in his native town of
Augsburg. He died in the odor of sanctity, a good Catholic
and a Count of the Empire, having seen his firm pay 54 per
cent, for the preceding sixteen years. 1J

II LUTHER

Like the rise of a great industry three centuries later, the
economic revolution which accompanied the Renaissance
gave a powerful stimulus to speculation. Both in Germany
andJp England, the Humanists turned^a stream ot pungent
rritirfen^y*-*^^ ot their age? M^fiatitiliS't think-

ers resharpened anold economic weapon for the armory of
princes. Objective economic analysis, still in its infancy, re-

LUTHER 73

ceived a new impetus from the controversies of practical men
on the rise in prices, on currency, and on the foreign ex-
changes.

The question of the attitude which religious opinion would
assume towards these new forces was momentous. It might
hail the outburst of economic enterprise as an instrument of
wealth and luxury, like the Popes who revelled in the redis-
covery of classical culture. It might denounce it as a relapse
into a pagan immorality, like the Fathers who had turned
with a shudder from the material triumphs of Rome. It might
attempt to harness the expanding energies to its own concep-
tion of man's spiritual end, like the Schoolmen who had
stretched old formulae to cover the new forces of capital and
commerce. It could hardly ignore them For, in spite of Ma-
chiavelli, social theory was only beginning to emancipate it-
self from the stiff ecclesiastical framework of the Middle
Ages The most systematic treatment of economic questions
was still that contained in the work of canonists, and divines
continued to pronounce judgment on problems of property
and contract with the same assurance as on problems of

theology.

Laymen might dispute the content of their teaching and
defy its conclusions But it was rarely, as yet, that they at-
tacked the assumption that questions of economic conduct
belonged to the province of the ecclesiastical jurist Bellar-
min complained with some asperity of the intolerable com-
plexity of the problems of economic casuistry which pious
merchants propounded in the confessional. The Spanish deal-
ers on the Antwerp Bourse, a class not morbidly prone to
conscientious scruples, were sufficiently deferential to ecclesi-
astical authority to send their confessor to Paris in order to
consult the theologians of the University as to the compati-
bility of speculative exchange business with the canon law.1'*
When Eck, later famous as the champion who crossed swords
with Luther, travelled to Italy, in order to seek from the
University of Bologna authoritative confirmation of his dar-
ing argument that interest could lawfully be charged in trans-
actions between merchants, no less a group of capitalists
than the great house of Fugger thought it worth while to fi-
nance an expedition undertaken in quest of so profitable a

truth 14

Individualistic, competitive, swept forward by an immense
expansion of commerce and finance, rather than of industry

74 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS

and offering opportunities of speculative gain on a scale un-
known before, the new economic civilization inevitably gave
rise to passionate controversy; and inevitably, since both the
friends and enemies of the Reformation identified it with so-
cial change, the leaders in the religious struggle were the pro-
tagonists in the debate. In Germany, where social revolution
had been fermenting for half a century, it seemed at last to
have come. The rise in prices, an enigma which baffled con-
temporaries till Bodin published his celebrated tract in
1S69,15 produced a storm of indignation against monopolists.
Since the rising led by Hans Boheim in 1476, hardly a dec-
ade had passed without a peasants ' revolt. Usury, long a
grievance with craftsman and peasant, had become a battle-
cry. From city after city municipal authorities, terrified by
popular demands for the repression of the extortioner, con-
sulted universities and divines as to the legitimacy of inter-
est, and universities and divines gave, as is their wont, a
loud, but confused, response. Melanchthon expounded godly
doctrine on the subject of money-lending and prices.16 Calvin
wrote a famous letter on usury and delivered sermons on the
same subject.17 Bucer sketched a scheme of social recon-
struction for a Christian prince.18 Bullinger produced a clas-
sical exposition of social ethics in the Decades which he
dedicated to Edward VI. r' Luther preached and pamphle-
teered against extortioners,20 and said that it was time "to
put a bit in the mouth of the holy company of the Fug-
gers." 21 Zwingli and Oecolampadius devised plans for the
reorganization of poor relief.22 Above all, the Peasants' War,
with its touching appeal to the Gospel and its frightful ca-
tastrophe, not only terrified Luther into his outburst: "Who-
so can, strike, smite, strangle, or stab, secretly or publicly
. . . such wonderful times are these that a prince can better
merit Heaven with bloodshed than another with prayer";23
it also helped to stamp on Lutheranism an almost servile re-
liance on the secular authorities. In England there was less
violence, but hardly less agitation, and a similar flood of writ-
ing and preaching. Latimer, Ponet, Crowley, Lever, Becon,
Sandys and Jewel — to mention but the best-known names —
all contributed to the debate.24 Whatever the social practice
of the sixteenth century may have been, it did not suffer for
lack of social teaching on the part of men of religion. If the
world could be saved by sermons and pamphlets, it would
have been a Paradise.

LUTHER 75

That the problems of a swiftly changing economic en-
vironment should have burst on Europe at a moment when
it was torn by religious dissensions more acute than ever be*
fore, may perhaps be counted as not least among the trage-
dies of its history. But differences of social theory did not
coincide with differences of religious opinion, and the mark
of nearly all this body of teaching, alike in Germany and in
England, is its conservatism. Where questions of social mo-
rality were involved, men whose names are a symbol of re-
ligious revolution stood, with hardly an exception, on the
ancient ways, appealed to medieval authorities, and repro-
duced in popular language the doctrines of the Schoolmen.

A view of the social history of the sixteenth century which
has found acceptance in certain quarters has represented the
Reformation as the triumph of the commercial spirit over the
traditional social ethics of Christendom Something like it is
of respectable antiquity. As early as 1540 Cranmer wrote to
Oziander protesting against the embarrassment caused to re-
formers in England by the indulgence to moral laxity, in the
matter alike of economic transactions and of marriage, al-
leged to be given by reformers in Germany. ^ By the seven-
teenth century the hints had become a theory and an argu-
ment. Bonnet taunted Calvin and Bucer with being the first
theologians to defend extortion,20 and it only remained for
a pamphleteer to adapt the indictment to popular consump-
tion, by writing bluntly that "it grew to a proverb that
usury was the brat of heresy "27 That the revolt from Rome
synchronized, both in Germany and in England, with a pe-
riod of acute social distress is undeniable, nor is any long
argument needed to show that, like other revolutions, it had
its seamy side What is sometimes suggested, however, is not
merely a coincidence of religious and economic movements,
but a logical connection between changes in economic or-
ganization and changes in religious doctrines. It is implied
that the bad social practice of the age was the inevitable ex-
pression of its religious innovations, and that, if the reform-
ers did not explicitly teach a conscienceless individualism,
individualism was, at least, the natural corollary of their
teaching In the eighteenth century, which had as little love
for the commercial restrictions of the ages of monkish super-
stition as for their political theory, that view was advanced
as eulogy. In our own day, the wheel seems almost to have
come full circle. What was then a matter for congratulation

76 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS

is now often an occasion for criticism. There are writers by
whom the Reformation is attacked, as inaugurating a period
of unscrupulous commercialism, which had previously been
held in check, it is suggested, by the teaching of the Church.

These attempts to relate changes in social theory to the
grand religious struggles of the age have their significance.
But the obiter dicta of an acrimonious controversy throw
more light on the temper of the combatants than on the sub-
stance of their contentions, and the issues were too complex
to be adequately expressed in the simple antitheses which
appealed to partisans. If capitalism means the direction of
industry by the owners of capital for their own pecuniary
gain, and the social relationships which establish themselves
Between them and the wage-earning proletariat whom they
control, then capitalism had existed on a grand scale both in
medieval Italy and in medieval Flanders. If by the capitalist
spirit is meant the temper which is prepared to sacrifice all
moral scruples to the pursuit of profit, it had been only too
familiar to the saints and sages of the Middle Ages It was
the economic imperialism of Catholic Portugal and Spain,
not the less imposing, if more solid, achievements of the
Protestant powers, which impressed contemporaries down to
the Armada. It was predominantly Catholic cities which
were the commercial capitals of Europe, and Catholic bank-
ers who were its leading financiers.

Nor is the suggestion that Protestant opinion looked with
indulgence on the temper which attacked restraints on eco-
nomic enterprise better founded If it is true that the Refor-
mation released forces which were to act as a solvent of the
traditional attitude of religious thought to social and eco-
nomic issues, it did so without design, and against the inten-
tion of most reformers In reality, however sensational the
innovations in economic practice which accompanied the ex-
pansion of financial capitalism in the sixteenth century, the
development of doctrine on the subject of economic ethics
was continuous, and, the more closely it is examined, the less
foundation does there seem to be for the view that the stream
plunged into vacancy over the precipice of the religious revo-
lution. To think of the abdication of religion from its theo-
retical primacy over economic activity and social institutions
as synchronizing with the revolt from Rome, is to antedate a
movement which was not finally accomplished for another
century and a half, and which owed as much to changes in

LUTHER 77

economic and political organization, as it did to develop-
ments in the sphere of religious thought. In the sixteenth
century religious teachers of all shades of opinion still
searched the Bible, the Fathers and the Corpus Juris Ca-
nonici for light on practical questions of social morality, and,
as far as the first generation of reformers was concerned,
there was no intention, among either Lutherans, or Calvin-
ists, or Anglicans, of relaxing the rules of good conscience,
which were supposed to control economic transactions and
social relations. If anything, indeed, their tendency was to in-
terpret them with a more rigorous severity, as a protest
against the moral laxity of the Renaissance, and, in partic-
ular, against the avarice which was thought to be peculiarly
the sin of Rome. For the passion for regeneration and puri-
fication, which was one element in the Reformation, was di-
rected against the corruption of society as well as of the
Church. Princes and nobles and business men conducted
themselves after their kind, and fished eagerly in troubled
waters But the aim of religious leaders was to reconstruct,
not merely doctrine and ecclesiastical government, but con-
duct and institutions, on a pattern derived from the forgotten
purity of primitive Christianity

The appeal from the depravity of the present to a golden
age of pristine innocence found at once its most vehement,
and its most artless, expression in the writings of the German
reformers. Like the return to nature in the eighteenth cen-
tury, it was the cry for spiritual peace of a society disillu-
sioned with the material triumphs of a too complex civiliza-
tion The prosperity of Augsburg, Nurnberg, Regcnsburg,
Ulm and Frankfurt, and even of lesser cities like Rotenburg
and Freiburg, had long been the admiration of all observers.
Commanding the great trade routes across the Alps and down
the Rhine, they had held a central position, which they were
to lose when the spice trade moved to Antwerp and Lisbon,
and were not to recover till the creation of a railway system
in the nineteenth century made Germany again the entrepot
between western Europe and Russia, Austria, Italy and the
near East But the expansion of commerce, which brought
affluence to the richer bourgeoisie, had been accompanied by
the growth of an acute social malaise, which left its mark on
literature and popular agitation, even before the Discoveries
turned Germany from a highway into a back-water. The
economic aspect of the development was the rise to a posi-

78 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS

tion of overwhelming preeminence of the new interests based
on the control of capital and credit. In the earlier Middle
Ages capital had been the adjunct and ally of the personal
labor of craftsman and artisan. In the Germany of the fif-
teenth century, as long before in Italy, it had ceased to be
a servant and had become a master. Assuming a separate
and independent vitality, it claimed the right of a predom-
inant partner to dictate economic organization in accordance
with its own exacting requirements.

Under the impact of these new forces, while the institu-
tions of earlier ages survived in form, their spirit and opera-
tion were transformed. In the larger cities the gild organiza-
tion, once a barrier to the encroachments of the capitalist,
became one of the instruments which he used to consolidate
his power. The rules of fraternities masked a division of the
brethren into a plutocracy of merchants, sheltered behind
barriers which none but the wealthy craftsman could scale,
and a wage-earning proletariat, dependent for their liveli-
hood on capital and credit supplied by their masters, and
alternately rising in revolt and sinking in an ever-expanding
morass of hopeless pauperism 28 The peasantry suffered
equally from the spread of a commercial civilization into the
rural districts and from the survival of ancient agtarian
servitudes As in England, the nouveaux riches of fhe towns
invested money in land by purchase and loan, and drove up
rents and fines by their competition But, while in England
the customary tenant was shaking off the onerous obliga-
tions of villeinage, and appealing, not without success, to
the royal courts to protect his title, his brother in south
Germany, where serfdom was to last till the middle of the
nineteenth century, found corvecs redoubled money-pay-
ments increased, and common rights curtailed, for the bene-
fit of an improverished nobles se, which saw in the exploita-
tion of the peasant the only means of maintaining its social
position in face of the rapidly growing wealth of the bour-
geoisie, and which seized on the now fashionable Roman
law as an instrument to give legal sanction to its harshest
exactions.29

On a society thus distracted by the pains of growth came
the commercial revolution produced by the Discoveries.
Their effect was to open a seemingly limitless field to eco-
nomic enterprise, and to sharpen the edge of every social
problem. Unable henceforward to tap through Venice the

LUTHER 70

wealth of the East, the leading commercial houses of south
Germany either withdrew from the trade across the Alps, to
specialize, like the Fuggers, in banking and finance, or or*
ganized themselves into companies, which handled at Lisbon
and Antwerp a trade too distant and too expensive to be
undertaken by individual merchants using only their own
resources. The modern world has seen in America the swift
rise of combinations controlling output and prices by the
power of massed capital. A somewhat similar movement took
place on the narrower stage of European commerce in the
generation before the Reformation. Its center was Germany,
and it was defended and attacked by arguments almost iden-
tical with those which are familiar today. The exactions of
rings and monopolies, which bought in bulk, drove weaker
competitors out of the field, "as a great pike swallows up
a lot of little fishes/' and plundered the consumer, were the
commonplaces of the social reformer/0 The advantages of
large-scale organization and the danger of interfering with
freedom of enterprise were urged by the companies. The
problem was on several occasions brought before the Im-
perial Diet. But the discovery of the sage who observed
that it is not possible to unscramble eggs had already been
made, and its decrees, passed in the teeth of strenuous op-
position from the interests concerned, do not seem to have
been more effective than modern legislation on the same
subject.

The passionate anti-capitalist reaction which such condi-
tions produced found expression in numerous schemes of
social reconstruction, from the so-called Reformation of the
Emperor Sigismund in the thirties of the fifteenth century,
to the Twelve Articles of the peasants in 1525 jl In the age
of the Reformation it was voiced by Hipler, who, in his
Divine Evangelical Reformation, urged that all merchants'
companies, such as those of the Fuggers, Hochstetters and
Welsers, should be abolished, by Hutten, who classed mer-
chants with knights, lawyers and the clergy as public
robbers; by Geiler von Kaiser berg, who wrote that the
monopolists were more detestable than Jews, and should b€
exterminated like wolves; and, above all, by Luther.32

Luther's utterances on social morality are the occasional
explosions of a capricious volcano, with only a rare flash of
light amid the torrent of smoke and flame, and it is idle tq

80 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS

scan them for a coherent and consistent doctrine. Compared
with the lucid and subtle rationalism of a thinker like St.
Antonio, his sermons and pamphlets on social questions
make an impression of naivete, as of an impetuous but ill-
informed genius, dispensing with the cumbrous embarrass-
ments of law and logic, to evolve a system of social ethics
from the inspired heat of his own unsophisticated conscious-
ness.

It was partly that they were pieces de cir con stance, thrown
off in the storm of a revolution, partly that it was precisely
the refinements of law and logic which Luther detested.
Confronted with the complexities of foreign trade and finan-
cial organization, or with the subtleties of economic analysis,
he is like a savage introduced to a dynamo or a steam-engine.
He is too frightened and angry even to feel curiosity. At-
tempts to explain the mechanism merely enrage him; he can
only repeat that there is a devil in it, and that good Chris-
tians will not meddle with the mystery of iniquity Bui
there is a method in his fury It sprang, not from ignorance,
for he was versed in scholastic philosophy, but from a con-
ception which made the learning of the schools appear trivial
or mischievous.

"Gold," wrote Columbus, as one enunciating a truism,
"constitutes treasure, and he who possesses it has all the
needs in this world, as also the means of rescuing souls from
Purgatory, and restoring them to the enjoyment of Para-
dise." 3^ It was this doctrine that all things have their price
— future salvation as much as present felicity — which scan-
dalized men who could not be suspected of disloyalty to the
Church, and which gave their most powerful argument to the
reformers. Their outlook on society had this in common
with their outlook on religion, that the essence of both was
the arraignment of a degenerate civilization before the ma-
jestic bar of an uncorrupted past Of that revolutionary
conservatism Luther, who hated the economic individualism
of the age not less than its spiritual laxity, is the supreme
example. His attitude to the conquest of society by the
merchant and financier is the same as his attitude towards
the commercialization of religion. When he looks at the
Church in Germany, he sees it sucked dry by the tribute
which flows to the new Babylon. When he looks at German
social life, he finds it ridden by a conscienceless money-

LUTHER 81

power, which incidentally ministers, like the banking busi-
ness of the Fuggers, to the avarice and corruption of Rome*
The exploitation of the Church by the Papacy, and th#
exploitation of the peasant and the craftsman by the cap-
italist, are thus two horns of the beast which sits on the
seven hills Both are essentially pagan, and the sword which
will slay both is the same. It is the religion of the Gospel.
The Church must cease to be an empire, and become a con-
gregation of believers Renouncing the prizes and struggles
which make the heart sick, society must be converted into
a band of brothers, performing in patient cheerfulness the
round of simple toil which is the common lot of the descend-
ants of Adam.

The children of the mind are like the children of the body.
Once born, they grow by a law of their own being, and, if
their parents could foresee their future development, it would
sometimes break their hearts Luther, who has earned eu-
logy and denunciation as the grand individualist, would
have been horrified, could he have anticipated the remoter
deductions to be derived from his argument. Wamba said
that to forgive as a Christian is not to forgive at all, and
a cynic who urged that the Christian freedom expounded
by Luther imposed more social restraints than it removed
would have more affinity with the thought of Luther him-
self, than the libertarian who saw in his teaching a plea for
treating questions of economic conduct and social organiza-
tion as sphitually indifferent.^ Luther > rpvnlt ag.gi'nqfl_a.ii..
thority was an attack, not on its rigor, but on its laxity and
its corruption His individualism was not the greed of the
plutocrat, eagfer^tb snatch from the weakness of public au-
thority an opportunity for personal gain. It was the^ngenu-
mis enthusiasm of the anarchist, who hungers for a society
inwMCrl order jWd fraternity will r^ign without "the tedi-
ous, stale, forbidding ways of custom, law and statute?'
because they well up in all theiF native purity from the
heart.

Professor Troeltsch has pointed out that Protestants, not
less than Catholics, emphasized the idea of a Church-civil-
ization, in which all departments of life, the State and
society, education and science, law, commerce and industry,
were to be regulated in accordance with the law of God.*4
That conception dominates all the utterances of Luther on

82 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS

social issues So far from accepting the view which was
afterwards to prevail, that the world of business is a closed
compartment with laws of its own, and that the religious
teacher exceeds his commission when he lays down rules for
the moral conduct of social affairs, he reserves for that
plausible heresy denunciations hardly less bitter than those
directed against Rome. The text of his admonitions is al-
ways, " Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Scribes
and Pharisees/' and his appeal is from a formal, legalistic,
calculated virtue to the natural kindliness which does not
need to be organized by law, because it is the spontaneous
expression of a habit of love. To restore is to destroy. The
comment on Luther's enthusiasm for the simple Christian
virtues of an age innocent of the artificial chicaneries of
ecclesiastical and secular jurisprudence came in the thunder
of revolution. It was the declaration of the peasants, that
"the message of Christ, the promised Messiah, the word of
life, teaching only love, peace, patience and concord," was
incompatible with serfdom, corvecs, and enclosures '

The practical conclusion to which such premises led was
a theory of society more medieval than that held by many
thinkers in the Middle Ages, since it dismissed the commer-
cial developments of the last two centuries as a relapse into
paganism. The foundation of it was partly the Bible, partly
a vague conception of a state of nature in which men had
not yet been corrupted by riches, partly the popular protests
against a commercial civilization which were everywhere in
the air, and which Luther, a man of the people, absorbed
and reproduced with astonishing naivete, even while he de-
nounced the practical measures proposed to give effect to
them. Like some elements in the Catholic reaction of the
twentieth century, the Protestant reaction of the sixteenth
sighed for a vanished age of peasant prosperity. The social
theory of Luther, who hated commerce and capitalism, has
its nearest modern analogy in the Distributive State of
Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton.

For the arts by which men amass wealth and power, as
for the anxious provision which accumulates for the future,
Luther had all the distrust of a peasant and a monk. Chris-
tians should earn their living in the sweat of their brow,
take no thought for the morrow, marry young and trust
Heaven to provide for its own. Like Melanchthon, Luther
thought that the most admirable life was that of the peasant,

LUTHER 83

for it was least touched by the corroding spirit of commer-
cial calculation, and he quoted Virgil to drive home the
lesson to be derived from the example of the patriarchs.88
The labor of the craftsman is honorable, for he serves the
community in his calling; the honest smith or shoemaker is
a priest. Trade is permissible, provided that it is confined
to the exchange of necessaries, and that the seller demands
no more than will compensate him for his labor and risk.
The unforgivable sins are idleness and covetousness, for they
destroy the unity of the body of which Christians are mem-
bers. The grand author and maintainer of both is Rome. For,
having ruined Italy, the successor of St. Peter, who lives in
a worldly pomp that no king or emperor can equal, has
fastened his fangs on Germany; while the mendicant orders,
mischievous alike in their practice and by their example,
cover the land with a horde of beggars. Pilgrimages, saints'
days and monasteries are an excuse for idleness and must
be suppressed. Vagrants must be either banished or com-
pelled to labor, and each town must organize charity for
the support of the honest poor 3T

Luther accepted the social hierachy, with its principles of
status and subordination, though he knocked away the ec-
clesiastical rungs in the ladder. The combination of religious
radicalism and economic conservatism is not uncommon,
and in the traditional conception of society, as an organism
of unequal classes with different rights and functions, the
father of all later revolutions found an arsenal of arguments
against change, which he launched with almost equal fury
against revolting peasants and grasping monopolists. His
vindication of the spiritual freedom of common men, and
his outspoken abuse of the German princes, had naturally
been taken at their face value by serfs groaning under an
odious tyranny, and, when the inevitable rising came, the
rage of Luther, like that of Burke in another age, was sharp-
ened by embarrassment at what seemed to him a hideous
parody of truths which were both sacred and his own. As
fully convinced as any medieval writer that serfdom was
the necessary foundation of society, his alarm at the attempt
to abolish it was intensified by a political theory which ex-
alted the absolutism of secular authorities, and a religious
doctrine which drew a sharp antithesis between the external
order and the life of the spirit. The demand of the peasants

84 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS

that villeinage should end, because " Christ has delivered and
redeemed us all, the lowly as well as the great, without ex-
ception, by the shedding of His precious blood," >>s horrified
him, partly as portending an orgy of anarchy, partly because
it was likely to be confused with and to prejudice, as in fact
it did, the Reformation movement, partly because (as he
thought) it degraded the Gospel by turning a spiritual mes-
sage into a program of social reconstruction. "This article
would make all men equal and so change the spiritual king-
dom of Christ into an external worldly one Impossible1 An
earthly kingdom cannot exist without inequality of persons
Some must be free, others serfs, some rulers, others subjects
As St. Paul says, 'Before Christ both master and slave are
one.' " "9 After nearly four centuries, Luther's apprehensions
of a too hasty establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven
appear somewhat exaggerated

A society may perish by corruption as well as by violence.
Where the peasants battered, the capitalists mined, and
Luther, whose ideal was the patriarchal ethics of a world
which, if it ever existed, was visibly breaking up, had as
little mercy for the slow poison of commerce and finance as
for the bludgeon of revolt. No contrast could be more strik-
ing than that between his social theory and the outlook of
Calvin. Calvin, with all his rigor, accepted the main institu-
tions of a commercial civilization, and supplied a creed to
the classes which were to dominate the future. The eyes of
Luther were on the past He saw no room in a Christian
society for those middle classes whom an English statesman
once described as the natural repersentatives of the human
race. International trade, banking and credit, capitalist in-
dustry, the whole complex of economic forces, which, next
to his own revolution, were to be the mightiest solvent of
the medieval world, seem to him to belong in their very
essence to the kingdom of darkness which the Christian will
shun. He attacks the authority of the canon law, only to
reaffirm more dogmatically the detailed rules which it had
been used to enforce. When he discusses economic questions
at length, as in his Long Sermon on Usury in 1520, or his
tract On Trade and Usury in 1524, his doctrines are drawn
from the straitest interpretation of ecclesiastical jurispru-
dence, unsoftened by the qualifications with which canonists

LUTHER 85

themselves had attempted to adapt its rigors to the exigen-
cies of practical life.

In the matter of prices he merely rehearses traditional
doctrines "A man should not say, 'I will sell my wares as
dear as I can or please/ but 'I will sell my wares as is right
and proper.' For thy selling should not be a work that is
within thy own power or will, without all law and limit, as
though thou wert a God, bounden to no one. But because
thy selling is a work that thou performest to thy neighbor,
it should be restrained within such law and conscience that
thou mayest practice it without harm or injury to him." 40
If a price is fixed by public authority, the seller must keep
to it If it is not, he must follow the price of common esti-
mation If he has to determine it himself, he must consider
the income needed to maintain him in his station in life, his
labor, and his risk, and must settle it accordingly He must
not take advantage of scarcity to raise it He must not cor-
ner the market. He must not deal in futures. He must not
sell dearer for deferred payments

On the subject of usury, Luther goes even further than
the orthodox teaching. He denounces the concessions to
practical necessities made by the canonists. "The greatest
misfortune of the German nation is easily the traffic in in-
terest . . The devil invented it, and the Pope, by giving
his sanction to it, has done untold evil throughout the
world "41 Not content with insisting that .lending ought to
be free, he denounces the payment of interest as compen-
sation for loss and the practice of investing in rent-charges,
both of which the canon law in his day allowed, and would
refuse usurers the sacrament, absolution, and Christian bur-
ial With such a code of ethics, Luther naturally finds the
characteristic developments of his generation — the luxury
trade with the East, international finance, speculation on the
exchanges, combinations and monopolies — shocking beyond
measure tk Foreign merchandise which brings from Calicut
and India and the like places wares such as precious silver
and jewels and spices . . and drain the land and people
of their money, should not be permitted. ... Of combina-
tions I ought really to say much, but the matter is endless
and bottomless, full of mere greed and wrong. . . . Who
is so stupid as not to see that combinations are mere out-
right monopolies, which even heathen civil laws — I will say

86 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS

nothing of divine right and Christian law — condemn as a
plainly harmful thing in all the world?" 42

So resolute an enemy of license might have been expected
to be the champion of law. It might have been supposed
that Luther, with his hatred of the economic appetites, would
have hailed as an ally the restraints by which, at least in
theory, those appetites had been controlled. In reality, of
course, his attitude towards the mechanism of ecclesiastical
jurisprudence and discipline was the opposite It was one,
not merely of indifference, but of repugnance The prophet
who scourged with whips the cupidity of the individual chas-
tised with scorpions the restrictions imposed upon it by
society; the apostle of an ideal ethic of Christian love turned
a shattering dialectic on the corporate organization of the
Christian Church. In most ages, so tragic a parody of hu-
man hopes are human institutions, there have been some
who have loved mankind, while hating almost everything
that men have done or made Of that temper Luther, who
lived at a time when the contrast betwen a sublime theory
and a hideous reality had long been intolerable, is the su-
preme example. He preaches a selfless charity, but he recoil^
with horror from every institution by which an attempt had
been made to give it a concrete expression He reiterate^
the content of medieval economic teaching with a literalness
rarely to be found in the thinkers of the later Middle Ages,
but for the rules and ordinances in which it had received a
positive, if sadly imperfect, expression, he has little but ab-
horrence. God speaks to the soul, not through the mediation
of the priesthood or of social institutions built up by man
but solus cum solo, as a voice in the heart and in the heart
alone. Thus the bridges between the worlds of spirit and of
sense are broken, and the soul is isolated from the society
of men, that it may enter into communion with its Maker
The grace that is freely bestowed upon it mav overflow in
its social relations; but those relations can supply no par-
ticle of spirtual nourishment to make easier the reception of
grace. L:ke the primeval confusion into which the fallen
Angel plunged on his fatal mission, they are a chaos of
brute matter, a wilderness of dry bones, a desert unsanctified
and incapable of contributing to sanctification. "It is cer-
tain that absolutely none among outward things, under what-
ever name they may be reckoned, has anv influence in pro-

LUTHER 87

ducing Christian righteousness or liberty. . . . One thing,
and one alone, is necessary for life, justification and Chris-
tian liberty; and that is the most holy word of God, the
Gospel of Christ." 43

The difference between loving men as a result of first lov-
ing God, and learning to love God through a growing love
for men, may not, at first sight, appear profound To Luther
it seemed an abyss, and Luther was right It was, in a sense,
nothing less than the Reformation itself For carried, as it
was not carried by Luther, to its logical result, the argument
made, not only good works, but sacraments and the Church
itself unnecessary The question of the religious significance
of that change of emphasis, and of the validity of the intel-
lectual processes by which Luther reached his conclusions, is
one for theologians Its effects on social theory were stag-
gering Since salvation is bestowed by the operation of grace
in the heart and by that alone, the whole fabric of organized
religion, which had mediated between the individual soul and
its Maker — divinely commissioned hierarchy, systematized
activities, corporate institutions — drops away, as the blas-
phemous trivialities of a religion of works The medieval
conception of the social order, which had regarded it as a
highly articulated organism of members contributing in their
different degrees to a spiritual purpose, was shattered, and
differences which had been distinctions within a larger unity
were now set in irreconcilable antagonism to each other.
Grace no longer completed nature it was the antithesis of
it Man's actions as a member of society were no longer the
extension of his life as a child of God they were its nega-
tion Secular interests ceased to possess, even remotely, a
religious significance, they might compete with religion, but
they could not enrich it Detailed rules of conduct — a Chris-
tian casuistry — are needless or objectionable the Christian
has a sufficient guide in the Bible and in his own conscience.
In one sense, the distinction between the secular and the
religious life vanished. Monasticism was, so to speak, secu-
larized, all men stood henceforward on the same footing
towards God; and that advance, which contained the germ
of all subsequent revolutions, was so enormous that all else
seems insignificant. In another sense, th~ distinction became
more profound than ever before. For, though all might be
sanctified, it was their inner life alone which could partake

88 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS

of sanctification. The world was divided into good and evil,
light and darkness, spirit and matter. The division between
them was absolute; no human effort could span the chasm.

The remoter corollaries of the change remained to be
stated by subsequent generations. Luther himself was not
consistent. He believed that it was possible to maintain the
content of medieval social teaching, while rejecting its sanc-
tions, and he insisted that good works would be the fruit
of salvation as vehemently as he denied that they could
contribute to its attainment. In his writings on social ques-
tions emphasis on the traditional Christian morality is com-
bined with a repudiation of its visible and institutional
framework, and in the tragic struggle which results between
spirit and letter, form and matter, grace and works, his in-
tention, at least, is not to jettison the rules of good con-
science in economic matters, but to purify them by an
immense effort of simplification. His denunciation of medie-
val charity, fraternities, mendicant orders, festivals and
pilgrimages, while it drew its point from practical abuses,
sprang inevitably from his repudiation of the idea that merit
could be acquired by the operation of some special machin-
ery beyond the conscientious discharge of the ordinary du-
ties of daily life His demand for the abolition of the canon
law was the natural corollary of his belief that the Bible
was an all-sufficient guide to action. While not rejecting
ecclesiastical discipline altogether, he is impatient of it.
The Christian, he argues, needs no elaborate mechanism to
teach him his duty or to correct him if he neglects it. He
has the Scriptures and his own conscience; let him listen
to them. "There can be no better instructions in ... all
transactions in temporal goods than that every man who is
to deal with his neighbor present to himself these command-
ments: 'What ye would that others should do unto you, do
ye also unto them,' and 'Love thy neighbor as thyself.' If
these were followed out, then everything would instruct
and arrange itself; then no law books nor courts nor judi-
cial actions would be required; all things would quietly and
simply be set to rights, for every one's heart and conscience
would guide him." 44

"Everything would arrange itself." Few would deny it.
But how if it does not? Is emotion really an adequate sub-
stitute for reason, and rhetoric for law? Is it possible to

LUTHER 89

solve the problem which social duties present to the individ-
ual by informing him that no problem exists? If it is true
that the inner life is the sphere of religion, does it neces-
sarily follow that the external order is simply irrelevant to
it? To wave aside the world of institutions and law as alien
to that of the spirit — is not this to abandon, instead of
facing, the task of making Christian morality prevail, for
which medieval writers, with their conception of a hierarchy
of values related to a common end, had attempted, however
inadequately, to discover a formula? A Catholic rationalist
had answered by anticipation Luther's contemptuous dis-
missal of law and learning, when he urged that it was use-
less for the Church to prohibit extortion, unless it was
prepared to undertake the intellectual labor of defining the
transactions to which the prohibition applied.4"' It was a
pity that Pecock's douche of common sense was not of a
kind which could be appreciated by Luther. He denounced
covetousness in general terms, with a surprising exuberance
of invective But, confronted with a request for advice on
the specific question whether the authorities of Danzig
shall put down usury, he retreats into the clouds. "The
preacher shall preach only the Gospel rule, and leave it to
each man to follow his own conscience. Let him who can
receive it, receive it, he cannot be compelled thereto further
than the Gospel leads willing hearts whom the spirit of
God urges forward/' 4(>

Luther's impotence was not accidental It sprang directly
from his fundamental conception that to externalize religion
in rules and ordinances is to degrade it. He attacked the
casuistry of the canonists, and the points in their teaching
with regard to which his criticism was justified were only
too numerous But the remedy for bad law is good law, not
lawlessness; and casuistry is merely the application of gen-
eral principles to particular cases, which is involved in any
living system of jurisprudence, whether ecclesiastical or
secular. If the principles are not to be applied, on the
ground that they are too sublime to be soiled by contact
with the gross woild of business and politics, what remains
of them? Denunciations such as Luther launched against
the Fuggers and the peasants, aspirations for an idyll of
Christian charity and simplicity, such as he advanced in his

90 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS

tract On Trade and Usury. Pious rhetoric may be edifying,
but it is hardly the panoply recommended by St. Paul.

"As the soul needs the word alone for life and justifica-
tion, so it is justified by faith alone, and not by any works.
. . . Therefore the first care of every Christian ought to be
to lay aside all reliance on works, and to strengthen his
faith alone more and more."47 The logic of Luther's re-
ligious premises was more potent for posterity than his at-
tachment to the social ethics of the past, and evolved its
own inexorable conclusions in spite of them. It enormously
deepened spiritual experience, and sowed the seeds from
which new freedoms, abhorrent to Luther, were to spring.
But it riveted on the social thought of Protestantism a dual-
ism which, as its implications were developed, emptied re-
ligion of its social content, and society of its soul. Between
light and darkness a great gulf was fixed. Unable to climb
upwards plane by plane, man must choose between salvation
and damnation. If he despairs of attaining the austere
heights where alone true faith is found, no human institu-
tion can avail to help him. Such, Luther thinks, will be
the fate of only too many.

He himself was conscious that he had left the world of
secular activities perilously divorced from spiritual re-
straints. He met the difficulty, partly with an admission
that it was insuperable, as one who should exult in the
majestic unreasonableness of a mysterious Providence, whose
decrees might not be broken, but could not, save by a few,
be obeyed ; partly with an appeal to the State to occupy the
province of social ethics, for which his philosophy could find
no room in the Church. "Here it will be asked, 'Who then
can be saved, and where shall we find Christians? For in
this fashion no merchandising would remain on earth.' . . .
You see it as I said, that Christians are rare people on
earth. Therefore stern hard civil rule is necessary in the
world, lest the world become wild, peace vanish, and com-
merce and common interests be destroyed. ... No one need
think that the world can be ruled without blood. The civil
sword shall and must be red and bloody." 48

Thus the axe takes the place of the stake, and authority,
expelled from the altar, finds a new and securer home upon
the throne. The maintenance of Christian morality is to be
transferred from the discredited ecclesiastical authorities to

CALVIN 91

the hands of the State. Skeptical as to the existence of
unicorns and salamanders, the age of Machiavelli and Henry
VIII found food for its credulity in the worship of that
rare monster, the God-fearing Prince.

III. CALVIN

The most characteristic and influential form of Protes-
tantism in the two centuries following the Reformation is
that which descends, by one path or another, from the
teaching of Calvin. Unlike the Lutheranism from which it
sprang, Calvinism, assuming different shapes in different
countries, became an international movement, which brought,
not peace, but a sword, and the path of which was strewn
with revolutions. Where Lutheranism had been socially con-
servative, deferential to established political authorities, the
exponent of a personal, almost a quietistic, piety, Calvinism
was an active and radical force. It was a creed which sought,
not merely to purify the individual, but to reconstruct
Church and State, and to renew society by penetrating every
department of life, public as well as private, with the influ-
ence of religion.

Upon the immense political reactions of Calvinism, this is
not the place to enlarge. As a way of life and a theory of so-
ciety, it possessed from the beginning one characteristic
which was both novel and important. It assumed an eco-
nomic organization which was relatively advanced, and ex-
pounded its social ethics on the basis of it. In this respect
the teaching of the Puritan moralists who derive most direct-
ly from Calvin is in marked contrast with that both of me-
dieval theologians and of Luther. The difference is not merely
one of the conclusions reached, but of the plane on which the
discussion is conducted. The background, not only of most
medieval theory, but also of Luther and his English contem-
poraries, is the traditional stratification of rural society. It
is a natural, rather than a money, economy, consisting of the
petty dealings of peasants and craftsmen in the small market
town, where industry is carried on for the subsistence of the
household and the consumption of wealth follows hard upon
the production of it, and where commerce and finance are
occasional incidents, rather than the forces which keep the
whole svstem in motion. When they criticize economic abuses,

92 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS

it is precisely against departures from that natural state of
things — against the enterprise, the greed of gain, the restless
competition, which disturb the stability of the existing order
with clamorous economic appetites — that their criticism is
directed.

These ideas were the traditional retort to the evils of un-
scrupulous commercialism, and they left some trace on the
writings of the Swiss reformers. Zwingli, for example, who,
in his outlook on society, stood midway between Luther and
Calvin, insists on the oft-repeated thesis that private prop-
erty originates in sin, warns the rich that they can hardly
enter the Kingdom of Heaven; denounces the Councils of
Constance and Basel — "assembled, forsooth, at the bidding
of the Holy Ghost'' — for showing indulgence to the mort-
gaging of land on the security of crops; and, while empha-
sizing that interest must be paid when the State sanctions it,
condemns it in itself as contrary to the law of God '" Of the
attempts made at Zurich and Geneva to repress extortion
something is said below. But these full-blooded denuncia-
tions of capitalism were not intended by their authors to sup-
ply a rule of practical life, since it was the duty of the in-
dividual to comply with the secular legislation by which
interest was permitted, and already, when they were uttered,
they had ceased to represent the conclusion of the left wing
of the Reformed Churches.

For Calvin, and still more his later interpreters, began
their voyage lower down the stream. Unlike Luther, who saw
economic life with the eyes of a peasant and a mystic, they
approached it as men of affairs, disposed neither to idealize
the patriarchal virtues of the peasant community, nor to
regard with suspicion the mere fact of capitalist enter-
prise in commerce and finance. Like early Christianity and
modern socialism, Calvinism was largely an urban move-
ment; like them, in its earlier days, it was carried from coun-
try to country partly by emigrant traders and workmen ; and
its stronghold was precisely in those social groups to which
the traditional scheme of social ethics, with its tieatment of
economic interests as a quite minor aspect of human affairs,
must have seemed irrelevant or artificial. As was to be ex-
pected in the exponents of a faith which had its headquarters
at Geneva, and later its most influential adherents in great
business centers, like Antwerp with its industrial hinterland,

CALVIN 93

London, and Amsterdam, its leaders addressed their teach-
ing, not of course exclusively, but none the less primarily,
to the classes engaged in trade and industry, who formed
the most modern and progressive elements in the life of the
age.

In doing so they naturally started from a frank recogni-
tion of the necessity of capital, credit and banking, large-
scale commerce and finance, and the other practical facts of
business life. They thus broke with the tradition which, re-
garding a preoccupation with economic interests "beyond
what is necessary for subsistence" as reprehensible, had stig-
matized the middleman as a parasite and the usurer as a
thief. They set the profits of trade and finance, which to the
medieval writer, as te Luther, only with difficulty escaped
censure as turpe lucrum, on the same level of respectability
as the earnings of the laborer and the rents of the landlord.
"What reason is there," wrote Calvin to a correspondent,
"why the income from business should not be larger than
that from land-owning? Whence do the merchant's profits
come, except from his own diligence and industry?" 50 It was
quite in accordance with the spirit of those words that Bu-
cer, even while denouncing the frauds and avarice of mer-
chants, should urge the English Government to undertake
the development of the woollen industry on mercantilist
lines.51

Since it is the environment of the industrial and commer-
cial classes which is foremost in the thoughts of Calvin and
his followers, they have to make terms with its practical ne-
cessities. It is not that they abandon the claim of religion to
moralize economic life, but that the life which they are con-
cerned to moralize is one in which the main features of a
commercial civilization are taken for granted, and that it is
for application to such conditions that their teaching is de-
signed. Early Calvinism, as we shall see, has its own rule,
and a rigorous rule, for the conduct of economic affairs. But
it no longer suspects the whole world of economic motives as
alien to the life of the spirit, or distrusts the capitalist as one
who has necessarily grown rich on the misfortunes of his
neighbor, or regards poverty as in itself meritorious, and it
is perhaps the first systematic body of religious teaching
which can be said to recognize and applaud the economic
virtues. Its enemy is not the accumulation of riches, but their

94 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS

misuse for purposes of self-indulgence or ostentation. Its
ideal is a society which seeks wealth with the sober gravity
of men who are conscious at once of disciplining their own
characters by patient labor, and of devoting themselves to a
service acceptable to God.

It is in the light of that change of social perspective that
the doctrine of usury associated with the name of Calvin is
to be interpreted. Its significance consisted, not in the phase
which it marked in the technique of economic analysis, but
in its admission to a new position of respectability of a pow-
erful and growing body of social interests, which, however
irrepressible in practice, had hitherto been regarded by reli-
gious theory as, at best, of dubious propriety, and, at worst,
as frankly immoral. Strictly construed, the famous pro-
nouncement strikes the modern reader rather by its rigor
than by its indulgence. "Calvin," wrote an English divine a
generation after his death, "deals with usurie as the apothe-
carie doth with poyson." 52 The apologetic was just, for nei-
ther his letter to Occolampadius, nor his sermon on the same
subject, reveal any excessive tolerance for the trade of the
financier. That interest is lawful, provided that it does not
exceed an official maximum, that, even when a maximum is
fixed, loans must be made gratis to the poor, that the bor-
rower must reap as much advantage as the lender, that ex-
cessive security must not be exacted, that what is venial as
an occasional expedient is reprehensible when carried on as
a regular occupation, that no man may snatch economic gain
for himself to the injury of his neighbor — a condonation of
usury protected by such embarrassing entanglements can
have offered but tepid consolation to the devout money-
lender.

Contemporaries interpreted Calvin to mean that the debtor
might properly be asked to concede some small part of his
profits to the creditor with whose capital they had been
earned, but that the exaction of interest was wrong if it
meant that "the creditor becomes rich by the sweat of the
debtor, and the debtor does not reap the reward of his labor."
There have been ages in which such doctrines would have
been regarded as an attack on financial enterprise rather than
.as a defense of it. Nor were Calvin's specific contributions
to the theory of usury strikingly original. As a hard-headed
lawyer, he was free both from the incoherence and from the

CALVIN 95

idealism of Luther, and his doctrine was probably regarded
by himself merely as one additional step in the long series of
developments through which ecclesiastical jurisprudence on
the subject had already gone. In emphasizing the difference
between the interest wrung from the necessities of the poor
and the interest which a prosperous merchant could earn with
borrowed capital, he had been anticipated by Major; in his
sanction of a moderate rate on loans to the rich, his position
was the same as that already assumed, though with some
hesitation, by Melanchthon. The picture of Calvin, the or-
ganizer and disciplinarian, as the parent of laxity in social
ethics, is a legend, Like the author of another revolution in
economic theory, he might have turned on his popularizers
with the protest: "I am not a Calvinist."

Legends are apt, however, to be as right in substance as
they are wrong in detail, and both its critics and its defend-
ers were correct in regarding Calvin's treatment of capital as
a watershed. What he did was to change the plane on which
the discussion was conducted, by treating the ethics of mon-
ey-lending, not as a matter to be decided by an appeal to a
special body of doctrine on the subject of usury, but as a
particular case of the general problem of the social relations
of a Christian community, which must be solved in the light
of existing circumstances. The significant feature in his dis-
cussion of the subject is that he assumes credit to be a nor-
mal and inevitable incident in the life of society. He there-
fore dismisses the oft-quoted passages from the Old Testa-
ment and the Fathers as irrelevant, because designed for
conditions which no longer exist, argues that the payment
of interest for capital is as reasonable as the payment of rent
for land, and throws on the conscience of the individual the
obligation of seeing that it does not exceed the amount dic-
tated by natural justice and the golden rule. He makes, in
short, a fresh start, argues that what is permanent is, not the
rule "non joenerabis" but "riquiti et la droiture," and ap-
peals from Christian tradition to commercial common sense,
which he is sanguine enough to hope will be Christian. Chi
such a view all extortion is to be avoided by Christians. But
capital and credit are indispensable; the financier is not a
pariah, but a useful member of society; and lending at in-
terest, provided that the rate is reasonable and that loans
are made freely to the poor, is not per se more extortionate

96 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS

than any other of the economic transactions without which
human affairs cannot be carried on. That acceptance of the
realities of commercial practice as a starting-point was of
momentous importance. It meant that Calvinism and its off-
shoots took their stand on the side of the activities which
were to be most characteristic of the future, and insisted that
it was not by renouncing them, but by untiring concentra-
tion on the task of using for the glory of God the opportuni-
ties which they offered, that the Christian life could and
must be lived.

It was on this practical basis of urban industry and com-
mercial enterprise that the structure of Calvinistic social
ethics was erected. Upon their theological background it
would be audacious to enter. But even an amateur may be
pardoned, if he feels that there have been few systems in
which the practical conclusions flow by so inevitable a logic
from the theological premises. "God not only foresaw," Cal-
vin wrote, "the fall of the first man, ... but also arranged
all by the determination of his own will." r>R Certain individ-
uals he chose as his elect, predestined to salvation from eter-
nity by "his gratuitous mercy, totally irrespective of human
merit"; the remainder have been consigned to eternal dam-
nation, "by a just and irreprehensible, but incomprehensible,
judgment." 54 Deliverance, in short, is the work, not of man
himself, who can contribute nothing to it, but of an objective
Power. Human effort, social institutions, the world of cul-
ture, are at best irrelevant to salvation, and at worst mis-
chievous. They distract man from the true aim of his exist-
ence and encourage reliance upon broken reeds.

That aim is not personal salvation, but the glorification of
God, to be sought, not by prayer only, but by action — the
sanctification of the world by strife and labor. For Calvinism,
with all its repudiation of personal merit, is intensely practi-
cal. Good works are not a way of attaining salvation, but
they are indispensable as a proof that salvation has been at-
tained. The central paradox of religious ethics — that only
those are nerved with the courage needed to turn the world
upside down, who are convinced that already, in a higher
sense, it is disposed for the best by a Power of which they
are the humble instruments— finds in it a special exemplifi-
cation. For the Calvinist the world is ordained to show forth
the majesty of God, and the duty of the Christian is to live

CALVIN 97

for that end. His task is at once to discipline his individual
life, and to create a sanctified society. The Church, the State,
the community in which he lives, must not merely be a means
of personal salvation, or minister to his temporal needs. It
must be a "Kingdom of Christ," in which individual duties
are performed by men conscious that they are "ever in their
great Taskmaster's eye," and the whole fabric is preserved
from corruption by a stringent and all-embracing discipline.
The impetus to reform or revolution springs in every age
from the realization of the contrast between the external or-
der of society and the moral standards recognized as valid by
the conscience or reason of the individual. And naturally it
is in periods of swift material progress, such as the sixteenth
and eighteenth centuries, that such a contrast is most acutely
felt. The men who made the Reformation had seen the Mid-
dle Ages close in the golden autumn which, amid all the cor-
ruption and tyranny of the time, still glows in the pictures
of Nurnberg and Frankfurt drawn by Aeneas Silvius and in
the woodcuts of Durer And already a new dawn of economic
prosperity was unfolding. Its promise was splendid, but it
had been accompanied by a cynical materialism which
seemed a denial of all that had been meant by the Christian
virtues, and which was the more horrifying because it was
in the capital of the Christian Church that it reached its
height. Shocked by the gulf between theory and practice, men
turned this way and that to find some solution of the ten-
sion which racked them. The German reformers followed
one road and preached a return to primitive simplicity. But
who could obliterate the achievements of two centuries, or
blot out the new worlds which science had revealed? The Hu-
manists took another, which should lead to the gradual re-
generation of mankind by the victory of reason over super-
stition and brutality and avarice. But who could wait for so
distant a consummation? Might there not be a third? Was
it not possible that, purified and disciplined, the very quali-
ties which economic success demanded — thrift, diligence, so-
briety, frugality — were themsleves, after all, the foundation,
at least, of the Christian virtues? Was it not conceivable
that the gulf which yawned between a luxurious world and
the life of the spirit could be bridged, not by eschewing ma-
terial interests as the kingdom of darkness, but by dedicat-
ing them to the service of God?

98 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS

It was that revolution in the traditional scale of ethical
values which the Swiss reformers desired to achieve; it was
that new type of Christian character that they labored to
create. Not as part of any scheme of social reform, but as
elements in a plan of moral regeneration, they seized on the
aptitudes cultivated by the life of business and affairs,
Stamped on them a new sanctification, and used them as the
warp of a society in which a more than Roman discipline
should perpetuate a character the exact antithesis of that fos-
tered by obedience to Rome. The Roman Church, it was
held, through the example of its rulers, had encouraged lux-
ury and ostentation; the members of the Reformed Church
must be economical and modest. It had sanctioned the spu-
rious charity of indiscriminate almsgiving; the true Chris-
tian must repress mendicancy and insist on the virtues of
industry and thrift. It had allowed the faithful to believe
that they could atone for a life of worldliness by the savor-
less formality of individual good works reduced to a com-
mercial system, as though man could keep a profit and loss
account with his Creator: the true Christian must organize
his life as a whole for the service of his Master. It had re-
buked the pursuit of gain as lower than the life of religion,
even while it took bribes from those who pursued gain with
success: the Christian must conduct his business with a high
seriousness, as in itself a kind of religion.

Such teaching, whatever its theological merits or defects,
was admirably designed to liberate economic energies, and to
weld into a disciplined social force the rising bourgeoisie,
conscious of the contrast between its own standards and
those of a laxer world, proud of its vocation as the standard-
bearer of the economic virtues, and determined to vindicate
an open road for its own way of life by the use of every
weapon, including political revolution and war, because the
issue which was at stake was not merely convenience or self-
interest, but the will of God. Calvinism stood, in short, not
only for a new doctrine of theology and ecclesiastical gov-
ernment, but for a new scale of moral values and a new ideal
of social conduct. Its practical message, it might perhaps be
said, was la carrier e ouverte — not aux talents, but au
caractere.

Once the world had been settled to their liking, the middle
classes persuaded themselves that they were the convinced

CALVIN 99

enemies of violence and the devotees of the principle of or-
der. While their victories were still to win, they were every-
where the spear-head of revolution. It is not wholly fanciful
to say that, on a narrower stage but with not less formidable
weapons, Calvin did for the bourgeoisie of the sixteenth cen-
tury what Marx did for the proletariat of the nineteenth, or
that the doctrine of predestination satisfied the same hunger
for an assurance that the forces of the universe are on the
side of the elect as was to be assuaged in a different age by
the theory of historical materialism. He set their virtues at
their best in sharp antithesis with the vices of the established
order at its worst, taught them to feel that they were a
chosen people, made them conscious of their great destiny in
the Providential plan and resolute to realize it. The new law
was graven on tablets of flesh ; it not merely rehearsed a les-
son, but fashioned a soul. Compared with the quarrelsome,
self-indulgent nobility of most European countries, or with
the extravagant and half-bankrupt monarchies, the middle
classes, in whom Calvinism took root most deeply, were a
race of iron. It was not surprising that they made several
revolutions, and imprinted their conceptions of political and
social expediency on the public life of half a dozen different
States in the Old World and in the New

The two main elements in this teaching were the insistence
on personal responsibility, discipline and asceticism, and the
call to fashion for the Christian character an objective em-
bodiment in social institutions Though logically connected,
they were often in practical discord. The influence of Cal-
vinism was not simple, but complex, and extended far be-
yond the circle of Churches which could properly be called
Calvinist. Calvinist theology was accepted where Calvinist
discipline was repudiated. The bitter struggle between Pres-
byterians and Independents in England did not prevent men,
to whom the whole idea of religious uniformity was funda-
mantally abhorrent, from drawing inspiration from the con-
ception of a visible Christian society, in which, as one of
them said, the Scripture was " really and materially to be ful-
filled." G5 Both an intense individualism and a rigorous Chris-
tian Socialism could be deduced from Calvin's doctrine.
Which of them predominated depended on differences of po-
litical environment and of social class. It depended, above
allf on the question whether Calvinists were, as at Geneva

100 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS

and in Scotland, a majority, who could stamp their ideals
on the social order, or, as in England, a minority, living on
the defensive beneath the suspicious eyes of a hostile Gov-
ernment.

In the version of Calvinism which found favor with the
English upper classes in the seventeenth century, individ-
ualism in social affairs was, on the whole, the prevalent phi-
losophy. It was only the fanatic and the agitator who drew
inspiration from the vision of a New Jerusalem descending
on England's green and pleasant land, and the troopers of
Fairfax soon taught them reason. But, if the theology of
Puritanism was that of Calvin, its conception of society, di-
luted by the practical necessities of a commercial age, and
softened to suit the conventions of a territorial aristocracy,
was poles apart from that of the master who founded a dis-
cipline, compared with which that of Laud, as Laud himself
dryly observed,56 was a thing of shreds and patches As both
the teaching of Calvin himself, and the practice of some
Calvinist communities, suggest, the social ethics of the heroic
age of Calvinism savored more of a collectivist dictatorship
than of individualism. The expression of a revolt against the
medieval ecclesiastical system, it stood itself, where circum-
stances favored it, for a discipline far more stringent and
comprehensive than that of the Middle Ages. If, as some his-
torians have argued, the philosophy of laissez faire emerged
as a result of the spread of Calvinism among the middle
classes, it did so, like tolerance, by a route which was in-
direct. It was accepted, less because it was esteemed for its
own sake, than as a compromise forced upon Calvinism at a
comparatively late stage in its history, as a result of its mod-
ification by the pressure of commercial interests, or of a bal-
ance of power between conflicting authorities.

The spirit of the system is suggested by its treatment of
the burning question of Pauperism The reform of tradition-
al methods of poor relief was in the air — Vives had written
his celebrated book in 1526 " — and, prompted both by Hu-
manists and by men of religion, the secular authorities all
over Europe were beginning to bestir themselves to cope with
what was, at best, a menace to social order, and, at worst, a
moral scandal. The question was naturally one which ap-
pealed strongly to the ethical spirit of the Reformation. The
characteristic of the Swiss reformers, who were much con-

CALVIN 101

cerned with it, was that they saw the situation not, like the
statesmen, as a problem of police, nor, like the more intelli-
gent Humanists, as a problem of social organization, but as
a question of character. Calvin quoted with approval the
words of St. Paul, "If a man will not work, neither shall he
eat," condemned indiscriminate alms-giving as vehemently
as any Utilitarian, and urged that the ecclesiastical authori-
ties should regularly visit every family to ascertain whether
its members were idle, or drunken, or otherwise undesirable.58
Oecolampadius wrote two tracts on the relief of the poor.59
Bullinger lamented the army of beggars produced by monas-
tic charity, and secured part of the emoluments of a dissolved
abbey for the maintenance of a school for the assistance of
the destitute.60 In the plan for the reorganization of poor re-
lief at Zurich, which was drafted by Zwingli in 1525, all
mendicancy was strictly forbidden; travellers were to be re-
lieved on condition that they left the town next day; provi-
sion was to be made for the sick and aged in special institu-
tions; no inhabitant was to be entitled to relief who wore
ornaments or luxurious clothes, who failed to attend church,
or who played cards or was otherwise disreputable. The basis
of his whole scheme was the duty of industry and the danger
of relaxing the incentive to work. "With labor," he wrote,
uwill no man now support himself . . . And yet labor is a
thing so good and godlike . . . that makes the body hale and
strong and cures the sicknesses produced by idleness. . . .
In the things of this life, the laborer is most like to God." 61
In the assault on pauperism, moral and economic motives
were not distinguished The idleness of the mendicant was
both a sin against God and a social evil; the enterprise of
the thriving tradesman was at once a Christian virtue and a
benefit to the community. The same combination of religious
zeal and practical shrewdness prompted the attacks on gam-
bling, swearing, excess in apparel and self-indulgence in eat-
ing and drinking. The essence of the system was not preach-
ing or propaganda, though it was prolific of both, but the at-
tempt to crystallize a moral ideal in the daily life of a visible
society, which should be at once a Church and a State. Hav-
ing overthrown monastlcism, its aim was to turn the secular
world into a gigantic monastery, and at Geneva, for a short
time, it almost succeeded. "In other places," wrote Knox of
that devoted city, "I confess Christ to be duly preached, but

102 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS

manners and religion so sincerely reformed I have not yet
seen in any place besides." °2 Manners and morals were reg-
ulated, because it is through the minutiae of conduct that the
enemy of mankind finds his way to the soul ; the traitors to
the Kingdom might be revealed by pointed shoes or golden
ear-rings, as in 1793 those guilty of another kind of incivisme
were betrayed by their knee-breeches. Regulation meant leg-
islation, and, still more, administration. The word in which
both were summarized was Discipline.

Discipline Calvin himself described as the nerves of re-
ligion,0" and the common observation that he assigned to it
the same primacy as Luther had given to faith is just. As or-
ganized in the Calvinist Churches, it was designed primarily
to safeguard the sacrament and to enforce a censorship of
morals, and thus differed in scope and purpose from the
canon law of the Church of Rome, as the rules of a private
society may differ from the code of a State. Its establishment
at Geneva, in the form which it assumed in the last half of
the sixteenth century, was the result of nearly twenty years
of struggle between the Council of the city and the Consis-
tory, composed of ministers and laymen. It was only in 1555
that the latter finally vindicated its right to excommunicate,
and only in the edition of the Institutes which appeared in
1559 that a scheme of church organization and discipline
was set out. But, while the answer to the question of the
constitution of the authority by whom discipline was to be
exercised depended on political conditions, and thus differed
in different places and periods, the necessity of enforcing a
rule of life, which was the practical aspect of discipline, was
from the start of the very essence of Calvinism. Its impor-
tance was the theme of a characteristic letter addressed by
Calvin to Somerset in October 1548, the moment of social
convulsion for which Bucer wrote his book, De Regno
Christi. The Protector is reminded that it is not from lack of
preaching, but from failure to enforce compliance with it,
that the troubles of England have sprung. Though crimes of
violence are punished, the licentious are spared, and the li-
centious have no part in the Kingdom of God. He is urged
to make sure that "les hommes soient tenus en bonne et hon-
neste discipline," and to be careful "que ceulx qui oyent la
doctrine de TEvangile s'approuvent estre Chrestiens par
sainctite de vie." 6*

CALVIN 103

"Prove themselves Christians by holiness of life" — the
words might be taken as the motto of the Swiss reformers,
and their projects of social reconstruction are a commentary
on the sense in which "holiness of life" was understood. It
was in that spirit that Zwingli took the initiative in forming
at Zurich a board of moral discipline, to be composed of
the clergy, the magistrates and two elders; emphasized the
importance of excommunicating offenders against Christian
morals; and drew up a list of sins to be punished by excom-
munication, which included, in addition to murder and theft,
unchastity, perjury and avarice, "especially as it discovers
itself in usury and fraud " ^ It was in that spirit that Calvin
composed in the Institutes a Protestant Summa and manual
of moral casuistry, in which the lightest action should be
brought under the iron control of a universal rule. It was in
that spirit that he drafted the heads of a comprehensive
scheme of municipal government, covering the whole range
of civic administration, from the regulations to be made for
markets, crafts, buildings and fairs to the control of prices,
interest and rents.66 It was in that spirit that he made Ge-
neva a city of glass, in which every household lived its life
under the supervision of a spiritual police, and that for a
generation Consistory and Council worked hand in hand, the
former excommunicating drunkards, dancers and contemners
of religion, the latter punishing the dissolute with fines and
imprisonment and the heretic with death. "Having consid-
ered," ran the preamble to the ordinances of 1576, which
mark the maturity of the Genevese Church, "that it is a
thing worthy of commendation above all others, that the doc-
trine of the Holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ shall be
preserved in its purity, and the Christian Church duly main-
tained by good government and policy, and also that youth
in the future be well and faithfully instructed, and the Hos-
pital well ordered for the support of the poor: Which things
can only be if there be established a certain rule and order
of living, by which each man may be able to understand the
duties of his position. . . ." °7 The object of it all was so sim-
ple. "Each man to understand the duties of his position"-—
what could be more desirable, at Geneva or elsewhere? It is
sad to reflect that the attainment of so laudable an end in-
volved the systematic use of torture, the beheading of a child
for striking its parents, and the burning of a hundred and

104 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS

fifty heretics in sixty years.68 Tantum religio potult suadere
malorum.

Torturing and burning were practised elsewhere by Gov-
ernments which affected no excessive zeal for righteousness.
The characteristic which was distinctive of Geneva — "the
most perfect school of Christ that ever was on earth since
the days of the Apostles" G9 — was not its merciless intoler-
ance, for no one yet dreamed that tolerance was possible. It
was the attempt to make the law of God prevail even in those
matters of pecuniary gain and loss which mankind, to judge
by its history, is disposed to regard more seriously than
wounds and deaths. "No member [of the Christian body],"
wrote Calvin in his Institutes, "holds his gifts to himself, or
for his private use, but shares them among his fellow mem-
bers, nor does he derive benefit save from those things which
proceed from the common profit of the body as a whole. Thus
the pious man owes to his brethren all that it is in his power
to give." 70 It was natural that so remorseless an attempt to
claim the totality of human interests for religion should not
hesitate to engage even the economic appetites, before which
the Churches of a later generation were to lower their arms.
If Calvinism welcomed the world of business to its fold with
an eagerness unknown before, it did so in the spirit of a con-
queror organizing a new province, not of a suppliant arrang-
ing a compromise with a still powerful foe. A system of mor-
als and a code of law lay ready to its hand in the Old Testa-
ment. Samuel and Agag, King of the Amalekites, Jonah and
Nineveh, Ahab and Naboth, Elijah and the prophets of
Baal, Micaiah the son of Imlah, the only true prophet of
the Lord, and Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel
to sin, worked on the tense imagination of the Calvinist as
did Brutus and Cassius on the men of 1793. The first half-
century of the Reformed Church at Geneva saw a prolonged
effort to organize an economic order worthy of the Kingdom
of Christ, in which the ministers played the part of Old Tes-
tament prophets to an Israel not wholly weaned from the
fleshpots of Egypt.

Apart from its qualified indulgence to interest, Calvinism
made few innovations in the details of social policy, and the
contents of the program were thoroughly medieval. The nov-
elty consisted in the religious zeal which was thrown into its
application. The organ of administration before which of-

CALVIN 105

fenders were brought was the Consistory, a mixed body Of
laymen and ministers. It censures harsh creditors, punishes
usurers, engrossers and monopolists, reprimands or fines the
merchant who defrauds his clients, the clothmaker whose
stuff is an inch too narrow, the dealer who provides short
measure of coal, the butcher who sells meat above the rates
fixed by authority, the tailor who charges strangers excessive
prices, the surgeon who demands an excessive fee for an op-
eration 71 In the Consistory the ministers appear to have
carried all before them, and they are constantly pressing for
greater stringency. From the election of Beza in place of Cal-
vin in 1564 to his death in 1605, hardly a year passes with-
out a new demand for legislation from the clergy, a new
censure on economic unrighteousness, a new protest against
one form or another of the ancient sin of avarice. At one mo-
ment, it is excessive indulgence to debtors which rouses their
indignation; at another, the advance of prices and rents
caused by the influx of distressed brethren from the persecu-
tions in France; at a third, the multiplication of taverns and
the excessive charges demanded by the sellers of wine.
Throughout there is a prolonged warfare against the twin
evils of extortionate interest and extortionate prices.

Credit was an issue of moment at Geneva, not merly for
the same reasons which made it a burning question every-
where to the small producer of the sixteenth century, but
because, especially after the ruin of Lyons in the French wars
of religion, the city was a financial center of some impor-
tance. It might be involved in war at any moment. In order
to secure command of the necessary funds, it had borrowed
heavily from Basle and Berne, and the Council used the cap-
ital to do exchange business and make advances, the rate of
interest being fixed at 10, and later at 12, per cent. To the
establishment of a bank the ministers, who had been con-
sulted, agreed; against the profitable business of advancing
money at high rates of interest to private persons they pro-'
tested, especially when the loans were made to spendthrifts
who used them to ruin themselves. When, ten years later, in
1580, the Council approved the project advanced by some
company promoters of establishing a second bank in the
city, the ministers led the opposition to it, pointed to the
danger of covetousness as revealed by the moral corruption
of financial cities such as Paris, Venice and Lyons, and sue-

106 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS

ceeded in getting the proposal quashed. Naturally, however,
the commoner issue was a more simple one. The capitalist
who borrowed in order to invest and make a profit could take
care of himself, and the ministers explained that they had
no objection to those "qui baillent leur argent aux marchands
pour emploier en marchandise." The crucial issue was that
of the money-lender who makes advances "simplement a un
qui aura besoin," and who thereby exploits the necessities
of his poorer neighbors.72

Against monsters of this kind the ministers rage without
ceasing. They denounce them from the pulpit in the name of
the New Testament, in language drawn principally from the
less temperate portions of the Old, as larrons, brigands, loups
et tigres, who ought to be led out of the city and stoned to
death. "The poor cry and the rich pocket their gains: but
what they are heaping up for themselves is the wrath of
pod. . . . One has cried in the market-place, l curse on those
who bring us dearth.' . . . The Lord has heard that cry ...
and yet we are asking the cause of the pestilence! ... A cut-
purse shall be punished, but the Lord declares by his prophet
Amos . . . ' Famine is come upon my people of Israel, O ye
who devour the poor.' The threats there uttered have been
executed against his people." 7<1 They demand that for his
second offense the usurer shall be excommunicated, or that,
if such a punishment be thought too severe, he shall at least
be required to testify his repentance publicly in church, be-
fore being admitted to the sacrament. They remind their
fellow-citizens of the fate of Tyre and Sidon, and, momen-
tarily despairing of controlling the money-lender directly,
they propose to deprive him of his victims by removing the
causes which create them. Pour tarir les ruisseaux il jaut
escouper la source. Men borrow because of "idleness, foolish
extravagance, foolish sins, and law suits." Let censors be es-
tablished at Geneva, as in Republican Rome, to inquire,
among rich as well as among poor, how each household earns
its livelihood, to see that all children of ten to twelve are
taught some useful trade, to put down taverns and litigation,
and to "bridle the insatiable avarice of those who are such
wretches that they seek to enrich themselves by the neces-
sities of their poor neighbors." 74

The Venerable Company advanced their program, but they
were not sanguine that it would be carried out, and they

CALVIN 107

concluded it by expressing to the City Fathers the
hope, not wholly free from irony, that "none of your honor-
able fellowship may be found spotted with such vices." Their
apprehensions were justified. The Council of Geneva endured
many things at the hands of its preachers, till, on the death
of Beza, it brought them to heel. But there were limits to its
patience, and it was in the field of business ethics that they
were most quickly reached. It did not venture to question
the right of the clergy to be heard on matters of commerce
and finance. The pulpit was press and platform in one; min-
isters had the public behind them, and, conscious of their
power, would in the last resort compel submission by threat-
ening to resign en masse. Profuse in expressions of sympa-
thy, its strategy was to let the cannon balls of Christian So-
cialism spend themselves on the yielding down of official pro-
crastination, and its first reply was normally qu'on y pense
un pen. To the clergy its inactivity was a new proof of com-
plicity with Mammon, and they did not hesitate to declare
their indignation from the pulpit. In 1574 Beza preached a
sermon in which he accused members of the Council of hav-
ing intelligence with speculators who had made a corner in
wheat. Throughout 1577 the ministers were reproaching the
Council with laxity in administration, and they finally de-
nounced it as the real author of the rise in the prices of bread
and wine. In 1579 they addressed to it a memorandum, set-
ting out a new scheme of moral discipline and social refornt
The prosperous bourgeoisie who governed Geneva had no
objection to discouraging extravagance in dress, or to ex-
horting the public to attend sermons and to send their chil-
dren to catechism. But they heard denunciations of covetous-
ness without enthusiasm, and on two matters they were ob-
durate. They refused to check, as the ministers concerned
to lower prices had demanded, the export of wine, on the
ground that it was needed in order to purchase imports of
wheat; and, as was natural in a body of well-to-do creditors,
they would make no concession to the complaint that debt-
ors were subjected to a "double usury," since they were com-
pelled to repay loans in an appreciating currency. Money fell
as well as rose, they replied, and even the late M. Calvin,
by whom the ordinance now criticized had been approved,
had never pushed his scruples to such lengths. Naturally, the
ministers were indignant at these evasions. They informed

108 £HE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS

the Council that large sums were being spent by speculators
in holding up supplies of corn, and launched a campaign of
sermons against avarice, with appropriate topical illustra-
tions. Equally naturally, the Council retorted by accusing
Beza of stirring up class hatred against the rich.75

The situation was aggravated by an individual scandal.
One of the magistrates, who regarded Beza's remarks as a
personal reflection, was rash enough to demand to be heard
before the Council, with the result that he was found guilty,
condemned to pay a fine, and compelled to forfeit fifty
crowns which he had lent at 10 per cent, interest. Evidently,
when matters were pushed to such lengths as this, no one,
however respectable, could feel sure that he was safe. The
Council and the ministers had already had words over the
sphere of their respective functions, and were to fall out a
year or two later over the administration of the local hospi-
tal. On this occasion the Council complained that the clergy
were interfering with the magistrates' duties, and implied
politely that they would be well advised to mind their own
business.

So monstrous a suggestion — as though there were any hu-
man activity which was not the business of the Church! —
evoked a counter-manifesto on the part of the ministers, in
which the full doctrine of the earthly Jerusalem was set
forth in all its majesty. They declined to express regret for
having cited before the Consistory those who sold corn at
extortionate prices, and for refusing the sacrament to one
of them. Did not Solomon say, "Cursed is who keeps his corn
in time of scarcity"? To the charge of intemperate language
Chauvet replied that the Council had better begin by burn-
ing the books of the Prophets, for he had done no more than
follow the example set by Hosea. "If we should be silent,"
said Beza, "what would the people say? That they are dumb
dogs. ... As to the question of causing scandals, for the
last two years there has been unceasing talk of usury, and,
for all that, no more than three or four usurers have been
punished. ... It is notorious everywhere that the city is full
of usurers, and that the ordinary rate is 10 per cent, or
more." 76 The magistrates renewed their remonstrances. They
had seen without a shudder an adulterer condemned to be
hanged, and had mercifully commuted his sentence to scourg-
ing through the town, followed by ten years' imprisonment

CALVIN

in chains.77 But at the godly proposal to make capitalists
die the death of Achan their humanity blenched. Besides, the
punishment was not only cruel, but dangerous. In Geneva,
"most men are debtors." If they are allowed to taste blood,
who can say where their fury will end? Yet, such is the
power of the spoken word, the magistrates did not venture
on a blunt refusal, but gave scripture for scripture. They in-
formed the ministers that they proposed to follow the exam-
ple of David, who, when rebuked by Nathan, confessed his
fault Whether the ministers replied in the language of Na-
than, we are not informed.

Recent political theory has been prolific in criticisms of
the omnicompetent State. The principle on which the collec-
tivism of Geneva rested may be described as that of the om-
nicompetent Church.78 The religious community formed a
closely organized society, which, while using the secular au-
thorities as police officers to enforce its mandates, not only
instructed them as to the policy to be pursued, but was itself
a kind of State, prescribing by its own legislation the stand-
ard of conduct to be observed by its members, putting
down offenses against public order and public morals, pro-
viding for the education of youth and for the relief of the
poor The peculiar relations between the ecclesiastical and
secular authorities, which for a short time made the system
possible at Geneva, could not exist to the same degree when
Calvinism was the creed, not of a single city, but of a mi-
nority in a national State organized on principles quite dif-
ferent from its own. Unless the State itself were captured,
rebellion, civil war or the abandonment of the pretension to
control society was the inevitable consequence. But the last
result was long delayed. In the sixteenth century, whatever
the political conditions, the claim of the Calvinist Churches
is everywhere to exercise a collective responsibility for the
moral conduct of their members in all the various relations
of life, and to do so, not least, in the sphere of economic
transactions, which offer peculiarly insidious temptations to
a lapse into immorality.

The mantle of Calvin's system fell earliest upon the Re-
formed Churches of France. At their first Synod, held in
1559 at Paris, where a scheme of discipline was adopted,
certain difficult matters of economic casuistry were dis-
cussed, and similar questions continued to receive attention

t;10 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS

at subsequent Synods for the next half-century, until, as the
historian of French Calvinism remarks, "they began to lax
the reins, yielding too much to the iniquity of the time." 79
Once it is admitted that membership of the Church involves
compliance with a standard of economic morality which the
Church must enforce, the problems of interpretation which
arise are innumerable, and the religious community finds it-
self committed to developing something like a system of case
law, by the application of its general principles to a succes-
sion of varying situations. The elaboration of such a system
was undertaken; but it was limited in the sixteenth century
both by the comparative simplicity of the economic struc-
ture, and by the fact that the Synods, except at Geneva, be-
ing concerned not to reform society, but merely to repress
the grosser kinds of scandal, dealt only with matters on
which specific guidance was demanded by the Churches.

Even so, however, the riddles to be solved were not a few.
What is to be the attitutde of the Churches towards those
who have grown rich on ill-gotten wealth? May pirates and
fraudulent tradesmen be admitted to the Lord's Supper?
May the brethren trade with such persons, or do they share
their sin if they buy their goods? The law of the State allows
moderate interest: what is to be the attitude of the Church?
What is to be done to prevent craftsmen cheating the con-
sumer with shoddy wares, and tradesmen oppressing him
with extortionate profits? Are lotteries permissible? Is it le-
gitimate to invest at interest monies bequeathed for the ben-
efit of the poor? The answers which the French Synods made
to such questions show the persistence of the idea that the
transactions of business are the province of the Church, com-
bined with a natural desire to avoid an impracticable rigor.
All persons who have wrung wealth unjustly from others
must make restitution before they be admitted to com-
munion, but their goods may be bought by the faithful, pro-
vided that the sale is public and approved by the civil au-
thorities. Makers of fraudulent wares are to be censured, and
tradesmen are to seek only "indfferent gain." On the ques-
tion of usury, the same division of opinion is visible in the
French Reformed Church as existed at the same time in
England and Holland, and Calvin's advice on the subject
was requested. The stricter school would not hear of confin-
ing the prohibition of usury to "excessive and scandalous"

CALVIN 111

exactions, or of raising money for the poor by interest on
capital. In France, however, as elsewhere, the day for these
heroic rigors had passed, and the common-sense view pre-
vailed. The brethren were required to demand no more than
the law allowed and than was consistent with charity. With-
in these limits interest was not to be condemned.80

Of the treatment of questions of this order by English
Puritanism something is said in a subsequent chapter. In
Scotland the views of the reformers as to economic ethics did
not differ in substance from those of the Church before the
Reformation, and the Scottish Book of Discipline denounced
covetousness with the same vehemence as did the "accursed
Popery" which it had overthrown. Gentlemen are exhorted
to be content with their rents, and the Churches are re-
quired to make provision for the poor. "Oppression of the
poor by exactions/' it is declared, "[and] deceiving of them
in buying or selling by wrong mete or measure ... do prop-
erly appertain to the Church of God, to punish the same as
God's word commandeth." bl The interpretation given to
these offenses is shown by the punishment of a usurer and
of a defaulting debtor before the Kirk Sessions of St. An-
drews.8- The relief of the poor was in 1579 made the statu-
tory duty of ecclesiastical authorities in Scotland, seven
years after it had in England been finally transferred to the
State. The arrangement under which in rural districts it re-
posed down to 1846 on the shoulders of ministers, elders and
deacons, was a survival from an age in which the real State
in Scotland had been represented , not by Parliament or
Council, but by the Church of Knox.

Of English-speaking communities, that in which the social
discipline of the Calvinist Church-State was carried to the
furthest extreme was the Puritan theocracy of New Eng-
land Its practice had more affinity with the iron rule of
Calvin's Geneva than with the individualistic tendencies of
contemporary English Puritanism. In that happy, bishopless
Eden, where men desired only to worship God "according to
the simplicitie of the gospel and to be ruled by the laws of
God's word," 83 not only were "tobacco and immodest fash-
ions and costly apparel," and "that vain custom of drinking
to one another," forbidden to true professors, but the
Fathers adopted towards that "notorious evil . . . whereby
most men walked in all their commerce — to buy as cheap

J12 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS

and sell as dear as they can," 8* an attitude which possibly
would not be wholly congenial to their more businesslike
descendants. At an early date in the history of Massachu-
setts a minister had called attention to the recrudescence of
the old Adam — "profit being the chief aim and not the
propagation of religion" — and Governor Bradford, observing
uneasily how men grew "in their outward estates," remarked
that the increase in material prosperity "will be the ruin of
New England, at least of the Churches of God there." 85
Sometimes Providence smote the exploiter. The immigrant
who organized the first American Trust — he owned the only
milch cow on board and sold the milk at 2d. a quart "being
after at a sermon wherein oppression was complained of ...
fell distracted." 8C Those who escaped the judgment of Hea-
ven had to face the civil authorities and the Church, which,
in the infancy of the colony, were the same thing.

Naturally the authorities regulated prices, limited the rate
of interest, fixed a maximum wage, and whipped incorrigible
idlers; for these things had been done even in the house of
bondage from which they fled. What was more distinctive
of the children of light was their attempt to apply the same
wholesome discipline to the elusive category of business
profits. The price of cattle, the Massachusetts authorities
decreed, was to be determined, not by the needs of the buyer,
but so as to yield no more than a reasonable return to the
seller.87 Against those who charged more, their wrath was
that of Moses descending to find the chosen people worship-
ping a golden calf. What little emotion they had to spare
from their rage against religious freedom, they turned
against economic license. Roger William touched a real affin-
ity when, in his moving plea for tolerance, he argued that,
though extortion was an evil, it was an evil the treatment of
which should be left to the discretion of the civil authorities.88

Consider the case of Mr. Robert Keane. His offense, by
general consent, was black. He kept a shop in Boston, in
which he took "in some . . . above 6d. in the shilling profit;
in some above 8c?.; and in some small things above two for
one"; and this, though he was "an ancient professor of the
gospel, a man of eminent parts, wealthy and having but one
child, having come over for conscience' sake and for the ad-
vancement of the gospel." The scandal was terrible. Profi-
teers were unpopular — "the cry of the country was great

CALVIN 113

against oppression" — and the grave elders reflected that a
reputation for greed would injure the infant community, ly-
ing as it did "under the curious observation of all Churches
and civil States in the world." In spite of all, the magistrates
were disposed to be lenient. There was no positive law in
force limiting profits; it was not easy to determine what
profits were fair; the sin of charging what the market could
stand was not peculiar to Mr. Keane; and, after all, the law
of God required no more than double restitution. So they
treated him mercifully, and fined him only £200.

Here, if he had been wise, Mr. Keane would have let the
matter drop. But, like some others in a similar position, he
damned himself irretrievably by his excuses. Summoned
before the church of Boston, he first of all "did with tears
acknowledge and bewail his covetous and corrupt heart,"
and then was rash enough to venture on an explanation, in
which he argued that the tradesman must live, and how
could he live, if he might not make up for a loss on one
article by additional profit on another? Here was a text on
which no faithful pastor could refrain from enlarging. The
minister of Boston pounced on the opportunity, and took
occasion "in his public exercise the next lecture day to lay
open the error of such false principles, and to give some
rules of direction in the case. Some false principles were
these. —

ul. That a man might sell as dear as he can, and buy
as cheap as he can.

"2. If a man lose by casualty of sea, etc., in some of his
commodities, he may raise the price of the rest.

"3 That he may sell as he bought, though he paid too
dear, and though the commodity be fallen, etc.

U4. That, as a man may take the advantage of his own
skill or ability, so he may of another's ignorance or neces-
sity

"5. Where one gives time for payment, he is to take like
recompense of one as of another."

The rules for trading were not less explicit: —

"1. A man may not sell above the current price, i.e.,
such a price as is usual in the time and place, and as an*
other (who knows the worth of the commodity) would give
for it if he had occasion to use it; as that is called current
money which every man will take, etc.

114 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS

"2. When a man loseth in his commodity for want of
Skill, etc., he must look at it as his own fault or cross, and
therefore must not lay it upon another.

"3. Where a man loseth by casualty of sea, etc., it is a
loss cast upon himself by Providence, and he may not ease
himself of it by casting it upon another; for so a man
should seem to provide against all providences, etc., that
he should never lose; but where there is a scarcity of the
commodity, there men may raise their price; for now it is a
hand of God upon the commodity, and not the person.

"4. A man may not ask any more for his commodity
than his selling price, as Ephron to Abraham: the land is
worth thus much."

It is unfortunate that the example of Ephron was not re-
membered in the case of transactions affecting the lands of
Indians, to which it might have appeared peculiarly appro-
priate. In negotiating with these children of the devil, how-
ever, the saints of God considered the dealings of Israel
with Gibeon a more appropriate precedent.

The sermon was followed by an animated debate within
the church. It was moved, amid quotations from i Cor. v.
n, that Mr. Keane should be excommunicated. That he
might be excommunicated, if he were a covetous person
within the meaning of the text, was doubted as little as that
he had recently given a pitiable exhibition of covetousness.
The question was only whether he had erred through ignor-
ance or carelessness, or whether he had acted "against his
conscience or the very light of nature" — whether, in short,
his sin was accidental or a trade. In the end he escaped with
his fine and admonition.89

If the only Christian documents which survived were the
New Testament and the records of the Calvin ist Churches
in the age of the Reformation, to suggest a connection be-
tween them more intimate than a coincidence of phraseology
would appear, in all probability, a daring extravagance.
Legalistic, mechanical, without imagination or compassion,
the work of a jurist and organizer of genius, Calvin's sys-
tem was more Roman than Christian, and more Jewish than
either. That it should be as much more tyrannical than the
medieval Church, as the Jacobin Club was than the ancien
regime, was inevitable. Its meshes were finer, its zeal and

CALVIN 11$

its efficiency greater. And its enemies were not merely actions
and writings, but thoughts.

The tyranny with which it is reproached by posterity
would have been regarded by its champions as a compli-
ment. In the struggle between liberty and authority, Cal-
vinism sacrified liberty, not with reluctance, but with en-
thusiasm. For the Calvinist Church was an army marching
back to Canaan, under orders delivered once for all from
Sinai, and the aim of its leaders was the conquest of the
Promised Land, not the consolation of stragglers or the en-
couragement of laggards. In war the classical expedient is
a dictatorship. The dictatorship of the ministry appeared
as inevitable to the whole-hearted Calvinist as the Commit-
tee of Public Safety to the men of 1793, or the dictatorship
of the proletariat to an enthusiastic Bolshevik. If it reached
its zenith where Calvin's discipline was accepted without
Calvin's culture and intellectual range, in the orgies of
devil worship with which a Cotton and an Endicott shocked
at last even the savage superstition of New England, that
result was only to be expected.

The best that can be said of the social theory and practice
of early Calvinism is that they were consistent. Most tyran-
nies have contented themselves with tormenting the poor.
Calvinism had little pity for poverty; but it distrusted
wealth, as it distrusted all influences that distract the aim
or relax the fibers of the soul, and, in the first flush of its
youthful austerity, it did its best to make life unbearable fol
the rich. Before the Paradise of earthly comfort it hung a
flaming brand, waved by the implacable shades of Moses
and Aaron.')0

CHAPTER III

The Church of England

"If any man be so addicted to his private, that he neglect the com-
mon, state, he is void of the sense of piety, and wisheth peace and
happiness to himself in vain For, whoever he be, he must live in the
body of the Commonwealth and in the body of the Church "

LAUD, Sermon before His Majesty, June 19, 1621.

THE ecclesiastical and political controversies which descend
from the sixteenth century have thrust into oblivion all
issues of less perennial interest. But the discussions which
were motived by changes in the texture of society and the
relations of classes were keen and continuous, nor was their
result without significance for the future. In England, as on
the Continent, the new economic realities came into sharp
collision with the social theory inherited from the Middle
Ages. The result was a re-assertion of the traditional doc-
trines with an almost tragic intensity of emotion, their
gradual retreat before the advance of new conceptions, both
of economic organization and of the province of religion,
and their final decline from a militant creed into a kind of
pious antiquarianism. They lingered, venerable ghosts, on
the lips of churchmen down to the Civil War. Then the
storm blew and they flickered out.

Medieval England had lain on the outer edge of economic
civilization, remote from the great highways of commerce
and the bustling financial centers of Italy and Germany.
With the commercial revolution which followed the Discov-
eries, a new age began After the first outburst of curiosity,
interest in explorations which yielded no immediate return
of treasure died down. It was not till more than half a cen-
tury later, when the silver of the New World was dazzling
all Europe, that Englishmen reflected that it might conceiv-
ably have been lodged in the Tower instead of at Seville,
and that talk of competition for America and the East be-
gan in earnest.

In the meantime, however, every other aspect of English
economic life was in process of swift transformation. Fo-
eign trade increased largely in the first half of the sixteenth

116

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND U?

century, and, as manufactures developed, cloth displaced
wool as the principal export. With the growth of commerce
went the growth of the financial organization on which com-
merce depends, and English capital poured into the growing
London money-market, which had previously been dom-
inated by Italian bankers. At home, with the expansion of
internal trade which followed the Tudor peace, opportunities
of speculation were increased, and a new class of middlemen
arose to exploit them. In industry, the rising interest was
that of the commercial capitalist, bent on securing the free-
dom to grow to what stature he could, and produce by
what methods he pleased. Hampered by the defensive ma-
chinery of the gilds, with their corporate discipline, their
organized torpor restricting individual enterprise, and their
rought equalitarianism, either he quietly evaded gild regu-
lations by withdrawing from the corporate towns, within
which alone the pressure of economic conformity could be
made effective, or he accepted the gild organization, cap-
tured its government, and by means of it developed a system
under which the craftsman, even if nominally a master, was
in effect the servant of an employer. In agriculture, the
customary organization of the village was being sapped from
below and battered down from above For a prosperous
peasantry, who had commuted the labor services that were
still the rule in France and Germany, were rearranging their
strips by exchange or agreement, and lords, no longer petty
sovereigns, but astute business men, were leasing their
demesnes to capital farmers, quick to grasp the profits to
be won by sheep-grazing, and eager to clear away the net-
work of communal restrictions which impeded its extension.
Into commerce, industry and agriculture alike, the revolu-
tion in prices, gradual for the first third of the centry, but
after 1540 a mill race, injected a virus of hitherto unsus-
pected potency, at once a stimulant to feverish enterprise
and an acid dissolving all customary relationships.

It was a society in rapid motion, swayed by new ambi-
tions and haunted by new terrors, in which both success and
failure had changed their meaning. Except in the turbulent
north, the aim of the great landowner was no longer to hold
at his call an army of retainers, but to exploit his estates as
a judicious investment. The prosperous merchant, once con-
tent to win a position of dignity and power in fraternity or

118 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

town, now flung himself into the task of carving his way to
solitary preeminence, unaided by the artificial protection of
guild or city. To the immemorial poverty of peasant and
craftsman, pitting, under the ever-present threat of famine,
their pigmy forces against an implacable nature, was added
the haunting insecurity of a growing, though still small,
proletariat, detached from their narrow niche in village or
borough, the sport of social forces which they could neither
understand, nor arrest, nor control.

I. THE LAND QUESTION

The England of the Reformation, to which posterity turns
as a source of high debates on church government and doc-
trine, was to contemporaries a cauldron seething with eco-
nomic unrest and social passions. But the material on which
agitation fed had been accumulating for three generations,
and of the grievances which exploded in the middle of the
century, with the exception of the depreciation of the cur-
rency, there was not one — neither enclosures and pasture
farming, nor usury, nor the malpractices of gilds, nor the
rise in prices, nor the oppression of craftsmen by merchants,
nor the extortions of the engrosser — which had not evoked
popular protests, been denounced by publicists, and pro-
duced legislation and administrative action, long before the
Reformation Parliament met. The floods were already run-
ning high, when the religious revolution swelled them with
a torrent of bitter, if bracing, waters. Its effect on the social
situation was twofold. Since it produced a sweeping redis-
tribution of wealth, carried out by an unscrupulous minority
using the weapons of violence, intimidation and fraud, and
succeeded by a*i orgy of interested misgovernment on the
part of its principal beneficiaries, it aggravated every prob-
lem, and gave a new turn to the screw which was squeezing
peasant and craftsman. Since it released a torrent of writ-
ing on questions not only of religion, but of social organ-
ization, it caused the criticisms passed on the changes of
the past half-century to be brought to a head in a sweeping
indictment of the new economic forces and an eloquent
restatement of the traditional theory of social obligations.
The center of both was the land question. For it was agra-

THE LAND QUESTION 119

rian plunder which principally stirred the cupidity of the
age, and agrarian grievances which were the most important
ground of social agitation.

The land question had been a serious matter for the great-
er part of a century before the Reformation. The first de-
tailed account of enclosure had been written by a chantry
priest in Warwickshire, soon after 1460 l Then had come
the legislation of 1489, 1515 and 1516, Wolsey's Royal Com-
mission in 1517, and more legislation in 1534.2 Throughout,
a steady stream of criticism had flowed from men of the
Renaissance, like More, Starkey and a host of less well-
known writers, dismayed at the advance of social anarchy,
and sanguine of the miracles to be performed by a Prince
who would take counsel of philosophers.

If, however, the problem was acute long before the con-
fiscation of the monastic estates, its aggravation by the fury
of spoilation let loose by Henry and Cromwell is not open
to serious question. It is a mistake, no doubt, to see the last
days of monasticism through rose-colored spectacles. The
monks, after all, were business men, and the lay agents
whom they often employed to manage their property nat-
urally conformed to the agricultural practice of the world
around them. In Germany revolts were nowhere more fre-
quent or more bitter than on the estates of ecclesiastical
land-owners.3 In England a glance at the proceedings of the
Courts of Star Chamber and Requests is enough to show
that holy men reclaimed villeins, turned copy-holders into
tenants at will, and as More complained, converted arable
land to pasture.4

In reality, the supposition of unnatural virtue on the part
of the monks, or of more than ordinary harshness on the
part of the new proprietors, is not needed in order to ex-
plain the part which the rapid transference of great masses
of property played in augmenting rural distress. The worst
side of all such sudden and sweeping redistributions is that
the individual is more or less at the mercy of the market,
and can hardly help taking his pound of flesh. Estates with
a capital value (in terms of modern money) of £15,000,000
to £20,000,000 changed hands.5 To the abbey lands which
came into the market after 1536 were added those of the
gilds and chantries in 1547. The financial necessities of the

129 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

Crown were too pressing to allow of its retaining them in
its own possession and drawing the rents; nor, in any case,
would that have been the course dictated by prudence to a
Government which required a party to carry through a revo-
lution. What it did, therefore, was to alienate most of the
land almost immediately, and to spend the capital as in-
come. For a decade there was a mania of land speculation.
Much of the property was bought by needy courtiers, at a
ridiculously low figure. Much of it passed to sharp business
men, who brought to bear on its management the methods
learned in the financial school of the City; the largest single
grantee was Sir Richard Gresham. Much was acquired by
middlemen, who bought scattered parcels of land, held them
for the rise, and disposed of them piecemeal when they got
a good offer; in London, groups of tradesmen — cloth-work-
ers, leather-sellers, merchant tailors, brewers, tallow-chand-
lers— formed actual syndicates to exploit the market. Rack-
renting, evictions, and the conversions of arable to pasture
were the natural result, for surveyors wrote up values at
each transfer, and, unless the last purchaser squeezed his
tenants, the transaction would not pay.6

Why, after all, should a landlord be more squeamish
than the Crown? "Do ye not know," said the grantee of
one of the Sussex manors of the monastery of Sion, in an-
swer to some peasants who protested at the seizure of their
commons, "that the King's Grace hath put down all the
houses of monks, friars and nuns? Therefore now is the time
come that we gentlemen will pull down the houses of such
poor knaves as ye be." 1 Such arguments, if inconsequent,
were too convenient not to be common. The protests of con-
temporaries receive detailed confirmation from the bitter
struggles which can be traced between the peasanty and
some of the new landlords — the Herberts, who enclosed a
whole village to make the park at Washerne, in which,
according to tradition, the gentle Sidney was to write his
Arcadia, the St. Johns at Abbot's Ripton, and Sir John
Yorke, third in the line of speculators in the lands of Whitby
Abbey, whose tenants found their rents raised from ,£29
to £64 a year, and for nearly twenty years were besieging
the Government with petitions for redress.8 The legend,
still repeated late in the seventeenth century, that the

THE LAND QUESTION 121

grantees of monastic estates died out in three generations,
though unveracious, is not surprising. The wish was father
to the thought.

It was an age in which the popular hatred of the endoser
and the engrosser found a natural ally in religious senti-
ment, schooled, as it was, in a tradition which had taught
that the greed of gain was a deadly sin, and that the plea
of economic self-interest did not mitigate the verdict, but
aggravated the offence. In England, as on the Continent,
doctrinal radicalism marched hand in hand with social con-
servatism. The most scathing attack on social disorders
came, not from the partisans of the old religion, but from
divines on the left wing of the Protestant party, who saw
in economic individualism but another expression of the
laxity and license which had degraded the purity of religion,
and who understood by reformation a return to the moral
austerity of the primitive Church, no less than to its gov-
ernment and doctrine. The touching words 9 in which the
leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace painted the social effects
of the dissolution of the Yorkshire monasteries were mild
compared with the denunciations launched ten years later
by Latimer, Crowley, Lever, Becon and Ponet.

Their passion was natural. What Aske saw in the green
tree, they saw in the dry, and their horror at the plunge
into social immorality was sharpened by the bitterness of
disappointed hopes. It was all to have been so different!
The movement which produced the Reformation was a
Janus, not with two, but with several, faces, and among
them had been one which looked wistfully for a political
and social regeneration as the fruit of the regeneration of
religion.10 In England, as in Germany and Switzerland, men
had dreamed of a Reformation which would reform the
State and society, as well as the Church. The purification,
not merely of doctrine, but of morals, the encouragement of
learning, the diffusion of education, the relief of poverty, by
the stirring into life a mass of sleeping endowments, a spirit-
ual and social revival inspired by the revival of the faith of
the Gospel — such, not without judicious encouragement
from a Government alert to play on public opinion, was the
vision which had floated before the eyes of the humanitarian
and the idealist.

J:22 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

It did not vanish without a struggle. At the very height
of the economic crisis, Bucer, the tutor of Edward VI, and
Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, stated the social pro-
gram of a Christian renaissance in the manual of Christian
politics which he drafted in order to explain to his pupil
how the Kingdom of Christ might be established by a
Christian prince. Its outlines were sharpened, and its details
elaborated, with all the remorseless precision of a disciple
of Calvin. Willful idlers are to be excommunicated by the
Church and punished by the State. The Government, a pious
mercantilist, is to revive the woollen industry, to introduce
the linen industry, to insist on pasture being put under the
plow. It is to take a high line with the commercial classes.
For, though trade itself is honorable, most traders are
rogues — indeed "next to the sham priests, no class of men
is more pestilential to the Commonwealth"; their works are
usury, monopolies, and the bribery of Governments to over-
look both. Fortunately, the remedies are simple. The State
must fix just prices — "a very necessary but an easy matter/'
Only "pious persons, devoted to the Commonwealth more
than to their own interests/' are to be allowed to engage
in trade at all. In every village and town a school is to be
established under a master eminent for piety and wisdom.
"Christian princes must above all things strive that men of
virtue may abound, and live to the glory of God. . . .
Neither the Church of Christ, nor a Christian Common-
wealth, ought to tolerate such as prefer private gain to the
public weal, or seek it to the hurt of their neighbors." "

The Christian prince strove, but not, poor child, as those
that prevail. The classes whose backing was needed to make
the Reformation a political success had sold their support
on terms which made it inevitable that it should be a social
disaster. The upstart aristocracy of the future had their
teeth in the carcass, and, having tasted blood, they were not
to be whipped off by a sermon. The Government of Edward
VI, like all Tudor Governments, made its experiment in fix-
ing just prices. What the astute Gresham, its financial ad-
viser, thought of restricting commerce to persons of piety,
we do not know, but can guess. As for the schools, what it
did for them Mr. Leach has told us. It swept them away
wholesale in order to distribute their endowments among

THE LAND QUESTION 123

courtiers. There were probably more schools m proportion
to the population at the end of the fifteenth century than
there were in the middle of the nineteenth. "These endow-
ments were confiscated by the State, and many still line the
pockets of the descendants of the statesmen of the day." ia
"King Edward VPs Grammar Schools" are the schools which
King Edward VI did not destroy.

The disillusionment was crushing. Was it surprising that
the reformers should ask what had become of the devout
imaginations of social righteousness, which were to have
been relalized as the result of a godly reformation? The end
of Popery, the curtailment of ecclesiastical privileges, six
new bishoprics, lectureships in Greek and Latin in place of
the disloyal subject of the canon law, the reform of doctrine
and ritual — side by side with these good things had come
some less edifying changes, the ruin of much education, the
cessation of much charity, a raid on corporate property
which provoked protests even in the House of Commons,13
and for ten years a sinister hum, as of the floating of an
immense land syndicate, with favorable terms for all suffi-
ciently rich, or influential, or mean, to get in on the ground
floor. Then men who had invested in the Reformation when
it was still a gambling stock naturally nursed the security,
and denounced the revolting peasants as communists, with
the mystical reverence for the rights of property which is
characteristic in all ages of the nouvcaux riches.14 The men
whose religion was not money said what they thought of
the business in pamphlets and sermons, which left respect-
able congregations spluttering with fury.

Crowley pilloried lease-mongers and usurers, wrote that
the sick begged in the street because rich men had seized
the endowments of hospitals, and did not conceal his sym-
pathy with the peasants who rose under Ket.15 Becon told
the gentry, eloquent on the vices of abbey-lubbers, that the
only difference between them and the monks was that they
were more greedy and more useless, more harsh in wringing
the last penny from the tenants, more selfish in spending
the whole income on themselves, more pitiless to the poor.1*
"In suppressing of abbies, cloisters, colleges and chantries,"
preached Lever in St. Paul's, "the intent of the King's Maj-
esty that dead is, was, and of this our king now is, very

124 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

godly, and the purpose, or else the pretence, of other won-
drous goodly: that thereby such abundance of goods as was
superstitiously spent upon vain ceremonies, or voluptuously
upon idle bellies, might come to the king's hands to bear his
great charges, necessarily bestowed in the common wealth,
or partly unto other men's hands, for the better relief of
the poor, the maintenance of learning, and the setting forth
of God's word. Howbeit, covetous officers have so used this
matter, that even those goods which did serve to the relief
of the poor, the maintenance of learning, and to comfortable
necessary hospitality in the common wealth, be now turned
to maintain worldly, wicked, covetous ambition. . . . You
which have gotten these goods into your own hands, to turn
them from evil to worse, and other goods more from good
unto evil, be ye sure it is even you that have offended God,
beguiled the king, robbed the rich, spoiled the poor, and
brought a common wealth into a common misery." 17

This was plain speaking indeed. Known to their enemies
as the "Commonwealth men" from their advocacy of social
reconstruction, the group of which Latimer was the prophet
and Hales the man of action naturally incurred the charge
of stirring up class-hatred, which is normally brought against
all who call attention to its causes. The result of their ac-
tivity was the appointment of a Royal Commission to
inquire into offences against the Acts forbidding the con-
version of arable to pasture, the introduction of legislation
requiring the maintenance of tillage and rebuilding of cot-
tages, and a proclamation pardoning persons who had taken
the law into their own hands by pulling down hedges. The
gentry were furious. Paget, the secretary to the Council,
who was quite ready for a reign of terror, provided that the
gentlemen began it, prophesied gloomily that the German
Peasants' War was to be reenacted in England; the Council,
most of whose members held abbey lands, was sullen; and
Warwick, the personification of the predatory property of
the day, attacked Hales fiercely for carrying out, as chair-
man of the Midland committee of the Depopulation Com-
mission, the duties laid upon him by the Government. "Sir,"
wrote a plaintiff gentleman to Cecil, "be plain with my
Lord's Grace, that under the pretense of simplicity and
poverty there may [not] rest much mischief. So do I fear
there doth in these men called Common Wealths and their

THE LAND QUESTION 125

adherents. To declare unto you the state of the gentlemen
(I mean as well the greatest as the lowest), I assure yoti
they are in such doubt, that almost they dare touch none
of them [i.e., the peasants], not for that they are afraid of
them, but for that some of them have been pent up and come
away without punishment, and that Common Wealth called
Latimer hath gotten the pardon of others."18
^ The "Common Wealth called Latimer" was unrepentant.
Combining gifts of humor and invective which are not very
common among bishops, his fury at oppression did not pre-
vent him from greeting the Devil with a burst of uproarious
laughter, as of a satyrical gargoyle carved to make the sin-
ner ridiculous in this world before he is damned in the next.
So he was delighted when he provoked one of his audience
into the exclamation, "Mary, a seditious fellow!" used the
episode as comic relief in his next sermon,19 and then, sud-
denly serious, redoubled his denunciations of step-lords and
rent-raisers. Had not the doom of the covetous been pro-
nounced by Christ Himself?

You Ihoughte that I woulde not icquyre
The bloode of all suche at your handc,
Bui be you sure, etcrnall fyre
Is redy for cche hell fyicbrande
Both for the housynge and the lande
That you have taken from the pore
Ye shall in hell dwell evermore J0

On the technicalities of the Tudor land question the au-
thors of such outbursts spoke without authority, and, thanks
to Mr. Leadam and Professor Gay, modern research has
found no difficulty in correcting the perspective of their
story. At once incurious and ill-informed as to the large
impersonal causes which were hurrying forward the reorgan-
ization of agriculture on a commercial basis, what shocked
them was not only the material misery of their age, but its
repudiation of the principles by which alone, as it seemed,
human society is distinguished from a pack of wolves. Their
enemy was not merely the Northumberlands or Herberts,
but an idea, and they sprang to the attack, less of spoliation
or tyranny, than of a creed which was the parent of both.
That creed was that the individual is absolute master of
his own, and, within the limits set by positive law, may

t26 THE CHURCH OP ENGLAND

exploit it with a single eye to his pecuniary advantage, un-
restrained by any obligation to postpone his own profit to
the well-being of his neighbors, or to give account of his ac-
tions to a higher authority. It was, in short, the theory of
property which was later to be accepted by all civilized
communities.

The question of the respective rights of lord and peasant
had never, at least within recent centuries, arisen in so acute
a form, for, as long as the customary tenants were part of
the stock of the manor, it was obviously to the interest
of the lord to bind them to the soil. Now all that had been
changed, at any rate in the south and midlands, by the ex-
pansion of the woollen industry and the devaluation of
money. Chevage and merchet had gone; forced labor, if it
had not gone, was fast going. The psychology of landowning
had been revolutionized, and for two generations the sharp
landlord, instead of using his seigneurial right to fine or
arrest run-aways from the villein nest, had been hunting
for flaws in titles, screwing up admission fines, twisting
manorial customs, and, when he dared, turning copyholds
into leases. The official opposition to depopulation, which
had begun in 1489 and was to last almost till 1640, infuri-
ated him, as an intolerable interference with the rights of
property. In their attacks on the restraints imposed by vil-
lage custom from below and by the Crown from above, in
their illegal defiance of the statutes forbidding depopulation,
and in their fierce resistance to the attempts of Wolsey and
Somerset to restore the old order, the interests which were
making the agrarian revolution were watering the seeds of
that individualistic conception of ownership which was to
carry all before it after the Civil War. With such a doctrine,
since it denied both the existence and the necessity of a
moral title, it was not easy for any religion less pliant than
that of the eighteenth century to make a truce. Once ac-
cepted, it was to silence the preaching of all social duties
save that of submission. If property be an unconditional
right, emphasis on its obligations is little more than the
graceful parade of a flattering, but innocuous, metaphor.
For, whether the obligations are fulfilled or neglected, the
right continues unchallenged and indefeasible. '

A religious theory of society necessarily regards with sus-
picion all doctrines which claim a large space for the unfet-

THE LAND QUESTION

tered play of economic self-interest. To the latter the
of activity is the satisfaction of desires, to the former the
felicity of man consists in the discharge of obligations im-
posed by God. Viewing the social order as the imperfect
reflection of a divine plan, it naturally attaches a high value
to the arts by which nature is harnessed to the service of
mankind. But, more concerned with ends than with means,
it regards temporal goods as at best instrumental to a
spiritual purpose, and its standpoint is that of Bacon, when
he spoke of the progress of knowledge as being sought for
"the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate."
To a temper nurtured on such ideas, the new agrarian
regime, with its sacrifice of the village — a fellowship of
mutual aid, a partnership of service and protection, "a little
commonwealth" — to the pecuniary interests of a great pro-
prietor, who made a desert where men had worked and
prayed, seemed a defiance, not only of man, but of God,
It was the work of "men that live as thoughe there were no
God at all, men that would have all in their owne handes,
men that would leave nothyng for others, men that would
be alone on the earth, men that bee never satisfied." 21 Its
essence was an attempt to extend legal rights, while repu-
diating legal and quasi-legal obligations. It was against this
new idolatry of irresponsible ownership, a growing, but not
yet triumphant, creed, that the divines of the Reformation
called down fire from heaven.

Their doctrine was derived from the conception of prop-
erty, of which the most elaborate formulation had been made
by the Schoolmen, and which, while justifying it on grounds
of experience and expediency, insisted that its use was lim
ited at every turn by the rights of the community and the
obligations of charity. Its practical application was an ideal-
ized version of the feudal order, which was vanishing before
the advance of more business-like and impersonal forms of
land-ownership, and which, once an engine of exploitation^
was now hailed as a bulwark to protect the weak against
the downward thrust of competition. Society is a hierarchy
of rights and duties. Law exists to enforce the second, as
much as to protect the first. Property is not a mere aggre-
gate of economic privileges, but a responsible office. It$
raison d'etre is not only income, but service. It is to secure
its owner such means, and no more than such means, as

128 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

may enable him to perform those duties, whether labor on
the land, or labor in government, which are involved in the
particular status which he holds in the system. He who
seeks more robs his superiors, or his dependents, or both.
He who exploits his property with a single eye to its eco
nomic possibilities at once perverts its very essence and
destroys his own moral title, for he has "every man's living
and does no man's duty." 22

The owner is a trustee, whose rights are derived from the
function which he performs and should lapse if he repudiates
it. They are limited by his duty to the State; they are lim-
ited no less by the rights of his tenants against him. Just
as the peasant may not cultivate his land in the way whicb
he may think most profitable to himself, but is bound by
the law of the village to grow the crops which the village
needs and to throw his strips open after harvest to his neigh-
bors's beasts, so the lord is required both by custom and by
statute to forego the anti-social profits to be won by method's
of agriculture which injure his neighbors and weaken the
State. He may not raise his rent or demand increased lines,
for the function of the peasant, though different, is not less
essential than his own He is, in short, not a rentitr, but an
officer, and it is for the Church to rebuke him when he sac-
rifices the duties of his charge to the greed for personal gain.
"We heartily pray thee to send thy holy spirit into the
hearts of them that possess the grounds, pastures, and dwell-
ing-places of the earth, that they, remembering themselves
to be thy tenants, may not rack and stretch out the rents
of their houses and lands, nor yet take unreasonable fines
and incomes, after the manner of covetous worldlings . .
but so behave themselves in letting out their tenements,
lands and pastures, that after this life they may be received
into everlasting dwelling places." 23 Thus, while the covetous
worldlings disposed the goods of this transitory life to their
liking, did a pious monarch consider their eternal welfare
in the Book of Private Prayer issued in 1553.

II. RELIGIOUS THEORY AND SOCIAL POLICY

If a philosophy ol society is to be effective, it must be as
mobile and realistic as the forces which it would control.
The weakness of an attitude which met the onset of insur-

RELIGIOUS THEORY AND SOCIAL POLICY 12$

gent economic interests with a generalized appeal to tradi-
tional morality and an idealization of the past was only too
obvious. Shocked, confused, thrown on to a helpless, if
courageous aftdsaiaaaffit, defensive by changes even in the
slowly moving world of agriculture, medieval social theory,
to which the most representative minds of the English
Church still clung, found itself swept off its feet after the
middle of the century by the swift rise of a commercial
civilization, in which all traditional landmarks seemed one
by one to be submerged. The issue over which the struggle
between the new economic movements of the age and the
scheme of economic ethics expounded by churchmen was
most definitely joined, and continued longest, was not, as the
modern reader might be disposed to expect, that of wages,
but that of credit, money-lending and prices. The center of
the controversy — the mystery of iniquity in which a host of
minor scandals were conveniently, if inaccurately epitomize*}
— was the problem which contemporaries described by the
word usury.

"Treasure doth then advance greatness," wrote Bacon, in
words characteristic of the social ideal of the age, "when
the wealth of the subject be rather in many hands than
few." 24VIn spite of the growing concentration of property,
Tudor England was still, to use a convenient modern phase,
a Distributive State. It was a community in which the own-
ership of land, and of the simple tools used in most indufc-
tries, was not the badge of a class, but the attribute of a
society, and in which the typical worker was a peasant
farmer, a tradesman, or a small master. In this world of
small property-owners, of whose independence and prosper-
ity English publicists boasted, in contrast with the "housed
beggars" of France and Germany, the wage-earners were a
minority scattered in the interstices of village and borough,
and, being normally themselves the sons of peasants, with
the prospect of stepping into a holding of their own, or, at
worst, the chance of squatting on the waste, were often in a
strong position vis-a-vis their employers. The special eco-
nomic malaise of an age is naturally the obverse of its spe*
cial qualities. Except in certain branches of the textile in-
dustry, the grievance which supplied fuel to social agitation!
which evoked programs of social reform, and which prompt-
ed both legislation and administrative activity, sprang, not

130 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

from the exploitation of a wage-earning proletariat by its
employers, but from the relation of the producer to the
landlord of whom he held, the dealer with whom he bought
and sold, and the local capitalist, often the dealer in another
guise, to whom he ran into debt. The farmer must borrow
money when the season is bad, or merely to finance the
interval between sowing and harvest. The craftsman must
buy raw materials on credit and get advances before his
wares are sold. The young tradesman must scrape together
a little capital before he can set up shop. Even the cottager,
who buys grain at the local market, must constantly ask
the seller to "give day." Almost every one, therefore, at one
time or another, has need of the money-lender. And the
lender is often a monopolist — "a money-master," a malster
or corn monger, "a rich priest," who is the solitary capitalist
in a community of peasants and artisans. Naturally, he is
apt to become their master.25

In such circumstances it is not surprising that there should
have been a popular outcry against extortion Inspired by
practical grievances, it found an ally, eloquent, if disarmed,
in the teaching of the Church. The doctrine as to the ethics
of economic conduct, which had been formulated by medie-
val Popes and interpreted by medieval Schoolmen, was re-
hearsed by the English divines of the sixteenth century,
not merely as the conventional tribute paid by a formal piety
to the wisdom of the past, but because the swift changes of
the period in commerce and agriculture had, not softened,
but accentuated, the problems of conduct for which it had
been designed. Nor was it only against the particular case
of the covetous money-lender that the preacher and the mor-
alist directed their arrows. The essence of the medieval
scheme of economic ethics had been its insistence on equity
in bargaining — a contract is fair, St Thomas had said, when
both parties gain from it equally. The prohibition of usury
had been the kernel of its doctrines, not because the gains
of the money-lender were the only species, but because, in
the economic conditions of the age, they were the most con-
spicuous species, of extortion.

In reality, alike in the Middle Ages and in the sixteenth
century, the word usury had not the specialized sense which
it carries today. Like the modern profiteer, the usurer was a
character so unpopular that most unpopular characters could

RELIGIOUS THEORY AND SOCIAL POLICY 131

be called usurers, and by the average practical man almost
any form of bargain which he thought oppressive would b6
classed as usurious. The interpretation placed on the word
by those who expounded ecclesiastical theories of usury was
equally elastic. Not only the taking of interest for a loan,
but the raising of prices by a monopolist, the beating down
of prices by a keen bargainer, the rack-renting of land by
a landlord, the sub-letting of land by a tenant at a rent
higher than he himself paid, the cutting of wages and the
paying of wages in truck, the refusal of discount to a tardy
debtor, the insistence on unreasonably good security for a
loan, the excessive profits of a middleman — all these had
been denounced as usury in the very practical thirteenth-
century manual of St. Raymond; 26 all these were among the
"unlawful chaffer," the "sublety and sleight," which was
what the plain man who sat on juries and listened to ser-
mons in parish churches meant by usury three centuries
later. If he had been asked why usury was wrong, he would
probably have answered with a quotation from Scripture.
If he had been asked for a definition of usury, he would
have been puzzled, and would have replied in the words of
a member of Parliament who spoke on the bill introduced
in 1571: "It standeth doubtful what usury is; we have nc
true definition of it." *7 The truth is, indeed, that any bar-
gain, in which one party obviously gained more advantage
than the other, and used his power to the full, was regarded
as usurious. The description which best sums up alike pop-
ular sentiment and ecclesiastical teaching is contained in
the comprehensive indictment applied by his parishioners
to an unpopular divine who lent at a penny in the shilling —
the cry of all poor men since the world began — Dr. Bennet
uis a great taker of advantages." 28

It was the fact that the theory of usury which the divines
of the sixteenth century inherited was not an isolated freak
of casuistical ingenuity, but one subordinate element in a
comprehensive system of social philosophy, which gave its
poignancy to the controversy of which it became the center.
The passion which fed on its dusty dialectics was fanned
by the conviction that the issue at stake was not merely a
legal technicality. It was the fate of the whole scheme of
medieval thought, which had attempted to treat economic

132 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

affairs as part of a hierarchy of values, embracing all inter-
ests and activities, of which the apex was religion.

If the Reformation was a revolution, it was a revolution
which left almost intact both the lower ranges of ecclesiasti-
cal organization and the traditional scheme of social thought.
The villager who, resisting the temptations of the alehouse,
morris dancing or cards, attended his parish church from
1530 to 1560, must have been bewildered by a succession
of changes in the appearance of the building and the form
of the services. But there was little to make him conscious
of any alteration in the social system of which the church
was the center, or in the duties which that system imposed
upon himself. After, as before, the Reformation, the parish
continued to be a community in which religious and social
obligations were inextricably intertwined, and it was as a
parishioner, rather than as a subject of the secular authority,
that he bore his share of public burdens and performed such
public functions as fell to his lot. The officers of whom he
saw most in the routine of his daily life were the church*
wardens. The place where most public business was trans-
acted, and where news of the doings of the great world came
to him, was the parish church. The contributions levied
from him were demanded in the name of the parish. Such
education as was available for his children was often given
by the curate or parish schoolmaster. Such training in co-
operation with his fellows as he received sprang from com-
mon undertakings maintained by the parish, which owned
property, received bequests, let out sheep and cattle, ad-
vanced money, made large profits by church sales, and occa-
sionally engaged in trade.29 Membership of the Church and
of the State being co-extensive and equally compulsory, the
Government used the ecclesiastical organization of the par-
ish for purposes which, in a later age, when the religious,
political and economic aspects of life were disentangled,
were to be regarded as secular. The pulpit was the channel
through which official information was conveyed to the pub-
lic and the duty of obedience inculcated. It was to the clergy
and the parochial organization that the State turned in
coping with pauperism, and down to 1597 collectors for the
poor were chosen by the churchwardens in conjunction with
the parson.

Where questions of social ethics were concerned, the re-

RELIGIOUS THEORY AND SOCIAL POLICY 133

ligious thought of the age was not less conservative than its
ecclesiastical organization. But in their view of religion as
embracing all sides of life, and in their theory of the par-
ticular social obligations which religion involved, the most
representative thinkers of the Church of England had no
intention of breaking with traditional doctrines. In the rooted
suspicion of economic motives which caused them to damn
each fresh manifestation of the spirit of economic enterprise
as a new form of the sin of covetousness, as in their insist-
ence that the criteria of economic relations and of the social
order were to be sought, not in practical expediency, but
in truths of which the Church was the guardian and the
exponent, the utterances of men of religion, in the reign
of Elizabeth, in spite of the revolution which had in-
tervened, had more affinity with the doctrines of the School-
men than with those which were to be fashionable after the
Restoration.

The oppressions of the tyrannous landlord, who used bis
economic power to drive an unmerciful bargain, were the
subject of constant denunciation down to the Civil War.
The exactions of middlemen — "merchants of mischief . . .
[who] do make all things dear to the buyers, and yet won-
derful vile and of small price to many that must needs set
or sell that which is their own honestly come by" — were
pilloried by Lever. J0 Nicholas Heming, whose treatise on
The Lawful Use of Riches became something like a stand-
ard work, expounded the doctrine of the just price, and
swept impatiently aside the argument which pleaded free-
dom of contract as an excuse for covetousness: "Cloake the
same by what title you liste, your synne is excedyng greate.
... He which hurteth but one man is in a damnable case;
what shall bee thought of thee, which bryngest whole
householdes to th^ir graves, or at the leaste art a meanes
of their extreame miserie? Thou maiest finde shiftes to
avoide the danger of men, but assuredly thou shalte not
escape the judgemente of God." 31 Men eminent among
Anglican divines, such as Sandys and Jewel, took part in
the controversy on the subject of usury. A bishop of Salis-
bury gave his blessing to the book of Wilson; an archbishop
of Canterbury allowed Mosse's sharp Arraignment to be
dedicated to himself; and a clerical pamphleteer in the
seventeenth century produced a catalogue of six bishops

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

and ten doctors of divinity — not to mention numberless
humbler clergy — who had written in the course of the last
hundred years on different aspects of the sin of extortion
in all its manifold varieties.82 The1 subject was still a favor-
ite of the ecclesiastical orator. The sixteenth-century preacher
was untrammeled by the convention which in a more
fastidious age was to preclude as an impropriety the dis-
cussion in the pulpit of the problems of the market-place.
"As it belongeth to the magistrate to punishe," wrote
Heming, "so it is the parte of the preachers to reprove
usurie. . . . First, they should earnestly inveigh against
all unlawful and wicked contractes. . . . Let them . . .
amend all manifest errours in bargaining by ecclesiasticall
discipline . . . Then, if they cannot reforme all abuses
which they shall finde in bargaines, let them take heede that
they trouble not the Churche overmuche, but commende the
cause unto God . . . Last of all, let them with diligence
admonishe the ritche men, that they suffer not themselves
to be entangled with the shewe of ritches." S3

"This," wrote an Anglican divine in reference to the ec-
clesiastical condemnation of usury, "hath been the generall
judgment of the Church for above this fifteene hundred
yeeres, without opposition, in this point. Poor sillie Church
of Christ, that could never finde a lawfull usurie before this
golden age wherein we live." a4 The first fact which strikes
the modern student of this body of teaching is its continuity
with the past. In its insistence that buying and selling, let-
ting and hiring, lending and borrowing, are to be controlled
by a moral law, of which the Church is the guardian, reli-
gious opinion after the Reformation did not differ from
religious opinion before it. The reformers themselves were
conscious, neither of the emancipation from the economic
follies of the age of medieval darkness ascribed to them in
the eighteenth century, nor of the repudiation of the tradi-
tional economic morality of Christendom, which some writ-
ers have held to have been the result of the revolt from
Rome. The relation in which they conceived themselves to
stand to the social theory of the medieval Church is shown
by the authorities to whom they appealed. "Therefore I
would not," wrote Dr. Thomas Wilson, Master of Requests
and for a short time Secretary of State, "have men alto-
gether to be enemies to the canon lawe, and to condempne

RELIGIOUS THEORY AND SOCIAL POLICY 135

every thinge there written, because the Popes were aucthours
of them, as though no good lawe could bee made by
them. . . . Nay, I will saye playnely, that there are some
suche lawes made by the Popes as be righte godly, saye
others what they list." J5 From the lips of a Tudor official,
such sentiments fell, perhaps with a certain piquancy. But,
in their appeal to the traditional teaching of the Church,
Wilson's words represented the starting point from which
the discussions of social questions still commonly set out.
The Bible, the Fathers and the Schoolmen, the decretals,
church councils, and commentators on the canon law — all
these, and not only the first, continued to be quoted as de-
cisive on questions of economic ethics by men to whom the
theology and government of the medieval Church were an
abomination. What use Wilson made of them, a glance at
his book will show. The writer who, after him, produced
the most elaborate discussion of usury in the latter part of
the century prefaced his work with a list of pre-Reforma-
tion authorities running into several pages.36 The author of
a practical memorandum on the amendment of the law with
regard to money-lending — a memorandum which appears to
have had some effect upon policy — thought it necessary to
drag into a paper concerned with the chicanery of financiers
and the depreciation of sterling by speculative exchange busi-
ness, not only Melanchthon, but Aquinas and Hostiensis.87,
Even a moralist who denied all virtue whatever to "the de-
crees of the Pope" did so only the more strongly to empha-
size the prohibition of uncharitable dealing contained in the
"statutes of holie Synodes and sayings of godlie Fathers,
whiche vehemently forbid usurie." 3h Objective economic
science was developing in the hands of the experts who
wrote on agriculture, trade, and, above all, on currency and
the foreign exchanges. But the divines, if they read such
works at all, waved them on one side as the intrusion of
Mammon into the fold of Christian morality, and by their
obstinate obscurantism helped to prepare an intellectual
nemesis, which was to discredit their fervent rhetoric as
the voice of a musty superstition. For one who examined
present economic realities, ten rearranged thrice-quoted
quotations from tomes of past economic casuistry. Sermon
was piled upon sermon, and treatise upon treatise. The as-
sumption of all is that the traditional teaching of the Church

13$ THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

as to social ethics is as binding on men's consciences after
the Reformation as it had been before it.

Pamphlets and sermons do not deal either with sins which
no one commits or with sins that every one commits, and
the literary evidence is not to be dismissed merely as pious
rhetoric. The literary evidence does not, however, stand
alone. Upon the immense changes made by the Reformation
in the political and social position of the Church it is not
necessary to enlarge. It became, in effect, one arm of the
State; excommunication, long discredited by abuse, was fast
losing what little terrors it still retained; a clergy three-
quarters of whom, as a result of the enormous transference
of ecclesiastical property, were henceforward presented by
lay patrons, were not likely to display any excessive inde-
pendence. But the canon law was nationalized, not abolished;
the assumption of most churchmen throughout the sixteenth
century was that it was to be administered; and the canon
law included the whole body of legislation as to equity in
contracts which had been inherited from the Middle Ages.
True, it was administered no longer by the clergy acting as
the: agents of Rome, but by civilians acting under authority
of the Crown. True, after the prohibition of the study of
canon law — after the estimable Dr. Layton had "set Dunce
in Bocardo" at Oxford— it languished at the universities.
True, for the seven years from 1545 to 1552, and again,
and on this occasion for good, after 1571, parliamentary
legislation expressly sanctioned loans at interest, provided
that it did not exceed a statutory maximum. But the con-
vulsion which changed the source of canon law did not, as
far as these matters are concerned, alter its scope. Its valid-
ity was not the less because it was now enforced in the
name, not of the Pope, but of the King.

As Maitland has pointed out,39 there was a moment
towards the middle of the century when the civil law was
pressing the common law hard. The civil law, as Sir Thomas
Smith assured the yet briefless barrister, offered a promising
career, since it was practiced in the ecclesiastical courts.40
Though it did not itself forbid usury, it had much to say
about it; it was a doctor of the civil law under Elizabeth
by whom the most elaborate treatise on the subject was
compiled.41 By an argument made familiar by a modern
controversy on which lay and ecclesiastical opinion have

RELIGIOUS THEORY AND SOCIAL POLICY 137

diverged, it is argued that the laxity of the State does not
excuse the consciences of men who are the subjects, not
only of the State, but of the Church. "The permission of
the Prince," it was urged, uis no absolution from the au-
thority of the Church. Supposing usury to be unlawful . . .
yet the civil laws permit it, and the Church forbids it. In
this case the Canons are to be preferred. ... By the laws
no man is compelled to be an usurer; and therefore he must
pay that reverence and obedience which is otherwise due to
them that have the rule over them in the conduct of their
souls.7' 4-

It was this theory which was held by almost all the ec-
clesiastical writers who dealt with economic ethics in the
sixteenth century. Their view was that, in the words of a
pamphleteer, "by the laws of the Church of England . . .
usury is simply and generally prohibited." 43 When the
lower House of Convocation petitioned the bishops in 1554
for a restoration of their priviliges, they urged, among other
matters, that " usurers may be punished by the canon lawes
as in tymes past has been used."44 In the abortive scheme
for the reorganization of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction drawn
up by Cranrner and Foxe, usury was included in the list of
offenses with which the ecclesiastical courts were to deal,
and, for the guidance of judges in what must often have
been somewhat knotty cases, a note was added, explaining
that it was not to be taken as including the profits derived
from objects which yielded increase by the natural process
of growth. Jr' Archbishop Grindal's injunctions to the laity
of the province of York (1571) expressly emphasized the
duty of presenting to the Ordinary those who lend and
demand back more than the principal, whatever the guise
under which the transaction may be concealed.40 Bishops'
articles of visitation down to the Civil War required the
presentation of uncharitable persons and usurers, together
with drunkards, ribalds, swearers and sorcerers.47 The rules
to be observed in excommunicating the impenitent promul-
gated in 1585, the Canons of the Province of Canterbury
in 1604, and of the Irish Church in 1634, all included a pro-
vision that the usurer should be subjected to ecclesiastical
discipline.48

The activity of the ecclesiastical courts had not ceased
with the Reformation, and they continued throughout the

138 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

last half of the century to play an important, if increasingly
unpopular, part in the machinery of local government. In ad-
dition to enforcing the elementary social obligation of char-
ity, by punishing the man who refused to "pay to the poor
men's box," or who was "detected for being an uncharitable
person and for not giving to the poor and impotent," 49 they
dealt also, at least in theory, with those who offended against
Christian morality by acts of extortion. The jurisdiction of
the Church in these matters was expressly reserved by legis-
lation, and ecclesiastical lawyers, while lamenting the en-
croachments of the common law courts, continued to claim
certain economic misdemeanors as their province. That, in
spite of the rising tide of opposition, the references to ques-
tions of this kind in articles of visitation were not wholly an
affair of common form, is suggested by the protests against
the interference of the clergy in matters of business, and by
the occasional cases which show that commercial transactions
'Continued to be brought before the ecclesiastical courts. The
typical usurer was apt, indeed, to outrage not one, but all, of
the decencies of social intercourse. "Thomas Wilkoxe," com-
plained his fellow burgesses, "is excommunicated, and dis-
quieteth the parish in the time of divine service. He is a hor-
rible usurer, taking Id. and sometimes 2d. for a shilling by
the week. He had been cursed by his own father and mother.
For the space of two years he hath not received the Holy
Communion, but every Sunday, when the priest is ready to
go to the Communion, then he departeth the church for the
receiving of his weekly usury, and doth not tarry the end of
divine service thrice in the year." 50 Whether the archdeacon
corrected a scandal so obviously suitable for ecclesiastical
discipline, we do not know. But in 1578 a case of clerical
usury is heard in the court of the archdeacon of Essex.51
Twenty-two years later, a usurer is presented with other of-
fenders on the occasion of the visitation of some Yorkshire
parishes.52 Even in 1619 two instances occur in which money-
lenders are cited before the Court of the Commissary of the
Bishop of London, on the charge of "lending upon pawnes
for an excessive gain commonly reported and cried out of."
One is excommunicated and afterwards absolved; both are
admonished to amend their ways.53

There is no reason, however, to suppose that such cases
were other than highly exceptional; nor is it from the occa-

RELIGIOUS THEORY AND SOCIAL POLICY 139

sional activities of the ever more discredited ecclesiastical ju-
risdiction that light on the practical application of the ideas
of the age as to social ethics is to be sought. Ecclesiastical
discipline is at all times but a misleading clue to the influ-
ence of religious opinion, and on the practice of a time when,
except for the Court of High Commission, the whole system
was in decay, the scanty proceedings of the courts Christian
throw little light. To judge the degree to which the doctrines
expounded by divines were accepted or repudiated by the
common sense of the laity, one must turn to the records
which show how questions of business ethics were handled
by individuals, by municipal bodies and by the Government.
The opinion of the practical man on questions of eco-
nomic conduct was in the sixteenth century in a condition of
even more than its customary confusion. A century before,
he had practised extortion and been told that it was wrong;
for it was contrary to the law of God. A century later, he was
to practise it and be told that he was right; for it was in
accordance with the law of nature. In this matter, as in oth-
ers of even greater moment, the two generations which fol-
lowed the Reformation were unblessed by these ample certi-
tudes. They walked in an obscurity where the glittering ar-
mor of theologians

made
A little glooming light, most like a shade.

In practice, since new class interests and novel ideas had
arisen, but had not yet wholly submerged those which pre-
ceded them, every shade of opinion, from that of the pious
burgess, who protested indignantly against being saddled with
a vicar who took a penny in the shilling, to the latitudinari-
anism of the cosmopolitan financier, to whom the confusion
of business with morals was a vulgar delusion, was repre-
sented in the economic ethics of Elizabethan England.

As far as the smaller property-owners were concerned, the
sentiment of laymen differed, on the whole, less widely from
the doctrines expounded by divines, than it did from the in-
dividualism which was beginning to carry all before it among
the leaders of the world of business. Against the rising finan-
cial interests of the day were arrayed the stolid conservatism
of the peasantry and the humble bourgeoisie, whose

140 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

ception of social expediency was the defense of customary
relations against innovation, and who regarded the growth of
this new power with something of the same jealous hostility
as they opposed to the economic radicalism of the enclosing
landlord. At bottom, it was an instinctive movement of self-
protection. Free play for the capitalist seemed to menace the
independence of the small producer, who tilled the nation's
fields and wove its cloth. The path down which the financier
beguiles his victims may seem at first to be strewn with roses;
but at the end of it lies — incredible nightmare — a regime of
universal capitalism, in which peasant and small master will
have been merged in a property-less proletariat, and "the
riches of the city of London, and in effect of all this realm,
shall be at that time in the hands of a few men having un-
merciful hearts " r'4

Against the landlord who enclosed commons, converted
arable to pasture, and rack-rented his tenants, local resent-
ment, unless supported by the Government, was powerless
Against the engrosser, however, it mobilized the traditional
machinery of maximum prices and market regulations, and
dealt with the usurer as best it could, by presenting him be-
fore the justices in Quarter Sessions, by advancing money
from the municipal exchequer to assist his victims, and even,
on occasion, by establishing a public pawnshop, with a mo-
nopoly of the right to make loans, as a protection to the in-
habitants against extreme "usurers and extortioners " The
commonest chanty of the age, which was the establishment
of a fund to make advances without interest to tradesmen,
was inspired by similar motives. Its aim was to enable the
youne: artisan or shopkeeper, the favorite victim of the
money-lender, to acquire the indispensable "stock,'1 without
which he could not set up in business r'r>

The issues which confronted the Government were natur-
ally more complicated, and its attitude was more ambiguous.
The pressure of commercial interests growing in wealth and
influence, its own clamorous financial necessities, the mere
logic of economic development, made it out of the question
for it to contemplate, even if it had been disposed to do so,
the rigorous economic discipline desired by the divines. Tra-
dition, a natural conservatism, the apprehension of public
disorder caused by enclosures or by distress among the in-
dustrial population, a belief in its own mission as the guar-

RELIGIOUS THEORY AND SOCIAL POLICY 14}

dian of "good order" in trade, not unmingled with a hope
that the control of economic affairs might be made to yield
agreeable financial pickings, gave it a natural bias to a policy
which aimed at drawing all the threads of economic life into
the hands of a paternal monarchy.

In the form which the system assumed under Elizabeth,
considerations of public policy, which appealed to the State,
were hardly distinguishable from considerations of social
morality, which appealed to the Church. As a result of the
Reformation the relations previously existing between the
Church and the State had been almost exactly reversed. In
the Middle Ages the former had been, at least in theory, the
ultimate authority on questions of public and private moral-
ity, while the latter was the police-officer which enforced its
decrees. In the sixteenth century, the Church became the
ecclesiastical department of the State, and religion was used
to lend a moral sanction to secular social policy. But the re-
ligious revolution had not destroyed the conception of a sin-
gle society, of which Church and State were different as-
pects; and, when the canon law became "the King's ecclesi-
astical law of England,'* the jurisdiction of both inevitably
tended to merge. Absorbing the ecclesiastical authority into
itself, the Crown had its own reason of political expediency
for endeavoring to maintain traditional standards of social
conduct, as an antidote for what Cecil called "the license
grown by liberty of the Gospel." Ecclesiastics, in their turn,
were public officers — under Elizabeth the bishop was nor-
mally also a justice of the peace — and relied on secular ma-
chinery to enforce, not only religious conformity, but Chris-
tian morality, because both were elements in a society in
which secular and spiritual interests had not yet been com-
pletely disentangled from each other. "We mean by the
Commonwealth," wrote Hoker, "that society with relation
unto all public affairs thereof, only the matter of true religion
accepted; by the Church, the same society, with only refer-
ence unto the matter of true religion, without any other
affairs besides."56

In economic and social, as in ecclesiastical, matters, the
opening years of Elizabeth were a period of conservative re-
construction. The psychology of a nation which lives pre-
dominantly by the land is in sharp contrast with that of a
commercial society. In the latter, when all goes well, contin-

142 THE CHUKCH OF ENGLAND

uous expansion is taken for granted as the rule of life, new
horizons are constantly opening, and the catchword of pol-
itics is the encouragement of enterprise In the former, the
number of niches into which each successive generation must
be fitted is strictly limited; movement means disturbance,
for, as one man rises, another is thrust down ; and the object
of statesmen is, not to fester individual initiative, but to pre-
vent social dislocation. It was in this mood that Tudor Privy
Councils approached questions of social policy and indus-
trial organization. Except when they were diverted by finan-
cial interests, or lured into ambitious, and usually unsuccess-
ful, projects for promoting economic development, their ideal
was, not progress, but stability. Their enemies were disorder,
and the restless appetites which, since they led to the en-
croachment of class on class, were thought to provoke it. Dis-
trusting economic individualism for reasons of state as heart-
ily as did churchmen for reasons of religion, their aim was to
crystallize existing class relationships by submitting them to
the pressure, at once restrictive and protective, of a paternal
Government, vigilant to detect all movements which men-
aced the established order, and alert to suppress them.

Take but degree away, untune that string,

And, hark, what discord follows '

Force should be right, or rather, right and wrong

(Between whose endless jar justice resides)

Should lose their names, and so should justice too

Then every thing includes itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite;

And appetite, an universal wolf,

So doubly seconded with will and power,

And, last, eat up himself

In spite of the swift expansion of commerce in the latter
part of the century, the words of Ulysses continued for long
to express the official attitude.

The practical application of such conceptions was an elab-
orate system of what might be called, to use a modern anal-
ogy, "controls." Wages, the movement of labor, the entry
into a trade, dealings in grain and in wool, methods of cul-
tivation, methods of manufacture, foreign exchange business,
rates of interest — all are controlled, partly by Statute, but
still more by the administrative activity of the Council. In
theory, nothing is too small or too great to escape the

RELIGIOUS THEORY AND SOCIAL POLICY 14J

eyes of an omniscient State. Does a landowner take advan*
tage of the ignorance of peasants and the uncertainty of the
law to enclose commons or evict copyholders? The Council,
while protesting that it does not intend to hinder him from
asserting his rights at common law, will intervene to stop
gross cases of oppression, to prevent poor men from being
made the victims of legal chicanery and intimidation, to set-
tle disputes by common sense and moral pressure, to remind
the aggressor that he is bound "rather to consider what is
agreeable ... to the use of this State and for the good of the
comon wealthe, than to seeke the uttermost advantage that
a landlord for his particular profit maie take amonge his
tenaunts." 57 Have prices been raised by a bad harvest? The
Council will issue a solemn denunciation of the covetousness
of speculators, "in conditions more like to wolves or cormo-
rants than to natural men," 58 who take advantage of the
dearth to exploit public necessities; will instruct the Com-
missioners of Grain and Victuals to suspend exports; and will
order justices to inspect barns, ration supplies, and compel
farmers to sell surplus stocks at a fixed price. Does the col-
lapse of the continental market threaten distress in the tex*
tile districts? The Council will put pressure on clothiers to
find work for the operatives, "this being the rule by which
the wool-grower, the clothier and merchant must be gov-
erned, that whosoever had a part of the gaine in profitable
times . . . must now, in the decay of trade . . . beare a part
of the publicke losses, as may best conduce to the good of
the publicke and the maintenance of the generall trade." 59
Has the value of sterling fallen on the Antwerp market? The
Council will consider pegging the exchanges, and will even
attempt to nationalize foreign exchange business by prohib-
iting private transactions altogether.60 Are local authorities
negligent in the administration of the Poor Law? The Coun-
cil, which insists on regular reports as to the punishment of
vagrants, the relief of the impotent, and the steps taken to
provide materials on which to employ the able-bodied, inun-
dates them with exhortations to mend their ways and with
threats of severer proceedings if they fail. Are tradesmen in
difficulties? The Council, which keeps sufficiently in touch
with business conditions to know when the difficulties of
borrowers threaten a crisis, endeavors to exercise a moderat-
ing influence by making an example of persons guilty of fla-

144 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

grant extortion, or by inducing the parties to accept a com-
promise. A mortgagee accused of "hard and unchristianty
dealing" is ordered to restore the land which he has seized,
or to appear before the Council. A creditor who has been
similarly "hard and unconscionable" is committed to the
Fleet. The justices of Norfolk are instructed to put pressure
on a money-lender who has taken "very unjust and immod-
erate advantage by way of usury." The bishop of Exeter is
urged to induce a usurer in his diocese to show "a more
Christian and charitable consideration of these his neigh-
bors." A nobleman has released two offenders imprisoned by
the High Commission for the Province of York for having
"taken usury contrary to the laws of God and of the realm/'
and is ordered at once to recommit them. No Government
can face with equanimity a state of things in which large
numbers of respectable tradesmen may be plunged into bank-
ruptcy. In times of unusual depression, the Council's inter-
vention to prevent creditors from pressing their claims to the
hilt was so frequent as to create the impression of something
like an informal moratorium.61

The Government of the Tudors and, still more, of the first
two Stuarts, were masters of the ast of disguising common-
place, and sometimes sordid, motives beneath a glittering
facade of imposing principles. In spite of its lofty declara-
tions of a disinterested solicitude for the public welfare, the
social policy of the monarchy not only was as slipshod in ex-
ecution as it was grandiose in design, but was not seldom per-
verted into measures disastrous to its ostensible ends, both
by the sinister pressure of sectional interests, and by the in-
sistent necessities of an empty exchequer. Its fundamental
conception, however — the philosophy of the thinkers and of
the few statesmen who rose above immediate exigencies to
consider the significance of the system in its totality — had
a natural affinity with the doctrines which commended them-
selves to men of religion. It was of an ordered and graded
society, in which each class performed its allotted function,
and was secured such a livelihood, and no more than such a
livelihood, as was proportioned to its status. "God and the
Kinge," wrote one who had labored much, amid grave per-
sonal dangers, for the welfare of his fellows, "hathe not sent
us the poor lyvinge we have, but to doe services therfore
amonge our neighbours abroade." *2 The divines who fulmi-

RELIGIOUS THEORY AND SOCIAL POLICY 145

nated against the uncharitable covetousness of the extortion-
ate middleman, the grasping money-lender, or the tyrannous
landlord, saw in the measures by which the Government
endeavored to suppress the greed of individuals or the col-
lision of classes a much needed cement of social solidarity,
and appealed to Caesar to redouble his penalties upon an eco-
nomic license which was hateful to God. The statesman con-
cerned to prevent agitation saw in religion the preservative
of order, and the antidote for the cupidity or ambition which
threatened to destroy it, and reenforced the threat of tem-
poral penalties with arguments that would not have been out
of place in the pulpit. To both alike religion is concerned
with something more than personal salvation. It is the sanc-
tion of social duties and the spiritual manifestation of the
corporate life of a complex, yet united, society. To both the
State is something more than an institution created by ma-
terial necessities or political convenience. It is the temporal
expression of spiritual obligations. It is a link between the in-
dividual soul and that supernatural society of which all
Christian men are held to be members It rests not merely
on practical convenience, but on the will of God.

Of that philosophy, the classical expression, at once the
most catholic, the most reasonable and the most sublime, is
the work of Hooker. What it meant to one cast in a narrower
mould, pedantic, irritable and intolerant, yet not without the
streak of harsh nobility which belongs to all who love an idea,
however unwisely, more than their own ease, is revealed in
the sermons and the activity of Laud. Laud's intellectual lim-
itations and practical blunders need no emphasis. If his vices
made him intolerable to the most powerful forces of his own
age, his virtues were not of a kind to commend him to those
of its successor, and history has been hardly more merciful
to him than were his political opponents. But an intense con-
viction of the fundamental solidarity of all the manifold
elements in a great community, a grand sense of the dignity
of public duties, a passionate hatred for the self-seeking pet-
tiness of personal cupidities and sectional interests — these
qualities are not among the weaknesses against which the
human nature of ordinary men requires to be most upon its
guard, and these qualities Laud possessed, not only in abun-
dance, but to excess. His worship of unity was an idolatry,
his detestation of faction a superstition. Church and State

146 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

are one Jerusalem: "Both Commonwealth and Church are
collective bodies, made up of many into one; and both so
near allied that the one, the Church, can never subsist but
in the other, the Commonwealth; nay, so near, that the same
men, which in a temporal respect make the Commonwealth,
do in a spiritual make the Church." 63 Private and public in-
terests are inextricably interwoven. The sanction of unity is
religion. The foundation of unity is justice: "God will not
bless the State, if kings and magistrates do not execute judg-
ment, if the widow and the fatherless have cause to cry out
against the 'thrones of justice/ " °4

To a temper so permeated with the conception that society
is an organism compact of diverse parts, and that the grand
end of government is to maintain their cooperation, every
social movement or personal motive which sets group against
group, or individual against individual, appears, not the irre-
pressible energy of life, but the mutterings of chaos. The
first demon to be exorcised is party, for Governments must
"entertain no private business," and "parties are ever private
ends." 65 The second is the self-interest which leads the indi-
vidual to struggle for riches and advancement. "There is no
private end, but in something or other it will be led to run
cross the public; and, if gain come in, though it be by 'mak-
ing shrines for Diana,' it is no matter with them though
Ephesus be in an uproar for it." of* For Laud, the political
virtues, by which he understands subordination, obedience,
a willingness to sacrifice personal interests for the good of
the community, are as much part of the Christian's religion
as are the duties of private life; and, unlike some of those
who sigh for social unity today, he is as ready to chastise the
rich and powerful, who thwart the attainment of that ideal,
as he is to preach it to the humble. To talk of holiness and
to practice injustice is mere hypocrisy. Man is born a mem-
ber of society and is dedicated by religion to the service of
his fellows. To repudiate the obligation is to be guilty of a
kind of political atheism.

"If any man be so addicted to his private, that he neglect
the common, state, he is void of the sense of piety and wish-
eth peace and happiness to himself in vain. For whoever he
be, he must live in the body of the Commonwealth, and in
the body of the Church." °7 To one holding such a creed eco-
nomic individualism was hardly less abhorrent than religious

RELIGIOUS THEORY AND SOCIAL POLICY 147

nonconformity, and its repression was a not less obvious
duty; for both seemed incompatible with the stability of a
society in which Commonwealth and Church were one. It is
natural, therefore, that Laud's utterances in the matter
of social policy should have shown a strong bias in favor
of the control of economic relations by an authoritarian
State, which reached its climax in the eleven years of
personal government. It was a moment when, partly in
continuance of the traditional policy of protecting peas-
ants and maintaining the supply of grain, partly for less
reputable reasons of finance, the Government was more than
usually active in harrying the depopulating landlord. The
Council gave sympathetic consideration to petitions from
peasants begging for protection or redress, and in 1630 di-
rections were issued to the justices of five midland counties
to remove all enclosures made in the last five years, on the
ground that they resulted in depopulation and were particu-
larly harmful in times of dearth. In 1632, 1635, and 1636,
three Commissions were appointed and special instructions
against enclosure were issued to the Justices of Assize. In
parts of the country, at any rate, land which had been laid
down to grass was plowed up in obedience to the Govern-
ment's orders In the four years from 1635 to 1638 a list of
some 600 offenders was returned to the Council, and about
/ 50,000 was imposed upon them in fines.68 With this policy
Laud was whole-heartedly in sympathy. A letter in his pri-
vate correspondence, in which he expresses his detestation of
enclosure, reveals the temper which evoked Clarendon's gen-
tle complaint that the archbishop made himself unpopular
by his inclination ua little too much to countenance the Com-
mission for Depopulation." °9 Laud was himself an active
member of the Commission, and dismissed with impatient
contempt the squirearchy's appeal to the common law. In the
day of his ruin he was reminded by his enemies of the need-
lessly sharp censures with which he barbed the fine imposed
upon an enclosing landlord.70

The prevention of enclosure and depopulation was merely
one element in a general policy, by which a benevolent Gov-
ernment, unhampered by what Laud had called "that noise"
of parliamentary debate, was to endeavor by even-handed
pressure to enforce social obligations on great and small, and
to prevent the public interest being sacrificed to an uncon-

148 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

scionable appetite for private gain. The preoccupation of the
Council with the problem of securing adequate food supplies
and reasonable prices, with poor relief, and, to a lesser de-
gree, with questions of wages, has been described by Miss
Leonard, and its attempts to protect craftsmen against ex-
ploitation at the hands of merchants by Professor Unwin.71
In 1630-1 it issued in an amended form the Elizabethan
Book of Orders, instructing justices as to their duty to see
that markets were served and prices controlled, appointed a
special committee of the Privy Council as Commissioners of
the Poor and later a separate Commission, and issued a Book
of Orders for the better administration of the Poor Law. In
1629, 1631, and again in 1637, it took steps to secure that
the wages of textile workers in East Anglia were raised, and
punished with imprisonment L* the Fleet an employer noto-
rious for paying in truck. As President of the Council of the
North, Wentworth protected the commoners whose vested
interests were threatened by the drainage of Hatfield Chase,
and endeavored to insist on the stricter administration of
the code regulating the woollen industry.72

Such action, even if inspired largely by the obvious inter-
est of the Government, which had enemies enough on its
hands already, in preventing popular discontent, was of a
kind to appeal to one with Laud's indifference to the opinion
of the wealthier classes, and with Laud's belief in the divine
mission of the House of David to teach an obedient people
"to lay down the private for the public sake." It is not sur-
prising, therefore, when the Star Chamber fines an engrosser
of corn, to find him improving the occasion with the remark
that the defendant has been "guilty of a most foule offense,
which the Prophet hath [called] in a very energeticall phrase
grynding the faces of the poore," and that the dearth has
been caused, not by God, but by "cruell menn;7J or taking
part in the proceedings of the Privy Council at a time when
it is pressing justices, apparently not without success, to com-
pel the East Anglian clothiers to raise the wages of spinners
and weavers; or serving on the Lincolnshire sub-committee
of the Commission on the Relief of the Poor, which was ap-
pointed in January 163 1.74

"A bishop," observed Laud, in answer to the attack of
Lord Saye and Sele, "may preach the Gospel more publicly
and to far greater edification in a court of judicature, or at
a Council-table, where great men are met together to draw

THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM

things to an issue, than many preachers in their several
carges can." 75 The Church, which had abandoned the pre-
tension itself to control society, found some compensation in
the reflection that its doctrines were not wholly without in-
fluence in impressing the principles which were applied by
the State. The history of the rise of individual liberty — to
use a question-begging phrase — in economic affairs follows
somewhat the same course as does its growth in the more
important sphere of religion, and is not unconnected with it.
The conception of religion as a thing private and individual
does not emerge until after a century in which *eligious free-
dom normally means the freedom of the State to prescribe
religion, not the freedom of the individual to worship God
as he pleases. The assertion of economic liberty as a natural
right comes at the close of a period in which, while a reli-
gious phraseology was retained and a religious interpretation
of social institutions was often sincerely held, the supernat-
ural sanction had been increasingly merged in doctrines
based on reasons of state and public expediency. "Jerusalem
. . . stands not for the City and the State only . . . nor for
the Temple and the Church only, but jointly for both." 76 In
identifying the maintenance of public morality with the spas-
modic activities of an incompetent Government, the Church
had built its house upon the sand. It did not require pro-
phetic gifts to foresee that the fall of the City would be
followed by the destruction of the Temple.

Ill THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM

Though the assertion of the traditional economic ethics
continued to be made by one school of churchmen down to
the meeting of the Long Parliament, it was increasingly the
voice of the past appealing to an alien generation. The ex-
pression of a theory of society which had made religion su-
preme over all secular affairs, it had outlived the synthesis
in which it had been an element, and survived, an archaic
fragment, into an age to whose increasing individualism the
idea of corporate morality was as objectionable as that of ec-
clesiastical discipline by bishops and archdeacons was be-
coming to its religion. The collision between the prevalent
practice, and what still purported to be the teaching of the
Church, is almost the commonest theme of the economic lit-
erature of the period from 1550 to 1640; of much of it, in-

ISO THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

deed, it is the occasion. Whatever the Church might say, men
had asked interest for loans, and charged what prices the
market would stand, at the very zenith of the Age of Faith.
But then, except in the great commercial centers and in the
high finance of the Papacy and of secular Governments,
their transactions had been petty and individual, d& occa-
sional shift to meet an emergency or seize an opportunity.
The new thing in the England of the sixteenth century was
that devices that had formerly been occasional were now
woven into the very texture of the industrial and commercial
civilization which was developing in the later years of Eliza-
beth, and whose subsequent enormous expansion was to s;ive
English society its characteristic quality and tone. Fifty
years later, Harrington, in a famous passage, described how
the ruin of the feudal nobility by the Tudors, by democra-
tizing the ownership of land, had prepared the way for the
bourgeois republic.77 His hint of the economic changes which
preceded the Civil War might be given a wider application.
The age of Elizabeth saw a steady growth of capitalism in
textiles and mining, a great increase of foreign trade and an
outburst of joint-stock enterprise in connection with it, the
beginnings of something like deposit banking in the hands
of the scriveners, and the growth, aided by the fall of Ant-
werp and the Government's own financial necessities, of a
money-market with an almost modern technique — specula-
tion, futures and arbitrage transactions — in London. The fu-
ture lay with the classes who sprang to wealth and influence
with the expansion of commerce in the later years of the
century, and whose religious and political aspirations were,
two generations later, to overthrow the monarchy.

An organized money-market has many advantages. But it
is not a school of social ethics or of political responsibility.
Finance, being essentially impersonal, a matter of opportuni-
ties, security and risks, acted among other causes as a solvent
of the sentiment, fostered both by the teaching of the Church
and the decencies of social intercourse among neighbors,
which regarded keen bargaining as "sharp practice. " In the
half-century which followed the Reformation, thanks to the
collapse of sterling on the international market, as a result of
a depreciated currency, war, and a foreign debt contracted
on ruinous terms, the state of the foreign exchanges was the
obsession of publicists and politicians. Problems of currency
and credit lend themselves more readilv than most economic

THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM iSt

questions to discussion in terms of mechanical causation. It
was in the long debate provoked by the rise in prices and th«*
condition of the exchanges, that the psychological assump*
tions, which were afterwards to be treated by economists as
of self-evident and universal validity, were first ham-
mered out.

"We see/7 wrote Malynes, "how one thing driveth or en*
forceth another, like as in a clock where there are many
wheels, the first wheel being stirred driveth the next and that
the third and so forth, till the last that moveth the instru-
ment that striketh the clock; or like as in a press going in
a strait, where the foremost is driven by him that is next to
him, and the next by him that followeth him." <s The spirit
of modern business could hardly be more aptly described.
Conservative writers denounced it as fostering a soulless in-
dividualism, but, needless to say, their denunciations were as
futile as they were justified. It might be possible to put fear
into the heart of the village dealer who bought cheap and
sold dear, or of the pawnbroker who took a hundred quarters
of wheat when he had lent ninety, with the warning that
''the devices of men cannot be concealed from Almighty
God." To a great clothier, or to a capitalist like Pallavicino,
Spinola, or Thomas Gresham, who managed the Government
business in Antwerp, such sentiments were foolishness, and
usurious interest appeared, not bad morals, but bad business.
Moving, as they did, in a world where loans were made, not
to meet the temporary difficulty of an unfortunate neigh-
bor, but as a profitable investment on the part ot not too
scrupulous business men, who looked after themselves and
expected others to do the same, they had scanty sympathy
with doctrines which reflected the spirit of mutual aid not
unnatural in the small circle of neighbors who formed the
ordinary village or borough in rural England.

It was a natural result of their experience that, without
the formal enunciation of any theory of economic individ-
ualism, they should throw their weight against the tradi-
tional restrictions, resent the attempts made by preachers
and popular movements to apply doctrines of charity and
"good conscience" to the impersonal mechanism of large-
scale transactions, and seek to bring public policy more into
accordance with their economic practice. The opposition to
the Statutes against depopulation offered by the self-interest
of the gentry was being supported in the latter years of Eliz-

152 THE CHURCH OP ENGLAND

abeth by free-trade arguments in the House of Commons,
and the last Act, which was passed in 1597, expressly al-
lowed land to be laid down to pasture for the purpose of
giving it a rest.79 From at any rate the middle of the cen-
tury, the fixing of prices by municipal authorities and by the
Government was regarded with skepticism by the more ad-
vanced economic theorists, and towards the end of the cen-
tury it produced complaints that, since it weakened the
farmer's incentive to grow corn, its results were the precise
opposite of those intended.80 As markets widened, the con-
trol of the middleman who dealt in wool and grain, though
strictly enforced in theory, showed unmistakable signs of
breaking down in practice. Gresham attacked the prohibition
of usury, and normally stipulated that financiers who sub-
scribed on his inducement to public loans should be indem-
nified against legal proceedings 81 Nor could he well have
done otherwise, for the sentiment of the City was that of
the merchant in Wilson's Dialogue: "What man is so mad-
de to deliver his moneye out of his own possession for
naughte? or whoe is he that will not make of his owne the
best he can?" SJ With such a wind of doctrine in their sails
men were not far from the days of complete freedom of
contract.

Most significant of all, economic interests were already ap-
pealing to the political theory which, when finally systema-
tized by Locke, was to prove that the State which interferes
with property and business destroys its own title to exist
"All free subject," declared a Committee of the House of
Commons in 1604, "are born inheritable, as to their land,
so also to the free exercise of their industry, in those trades
whereto they apply themselves and whereby they are to
live. Merchandise being the chief and richest of all other, and
of greater extent and importance than all the rest, it is
against the natural right and liberty of the subjects of Eng-
land to restrain it into the hands of some few " s ' The process
by which natural justice, imperfectly embodied in positive
law, was replaced as the source of authority by positive law
which might or might not be the expression of natural jus-
tice, had its analogy in the rejection by social theory of the
whole conception of an objective standard of economic
equity. The law of nature had been invoked by medieval
writers as a moral restraint upon economic self-interest. By
the seventeenth century, a significant revolution had taken

THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM 153

place. "Nature" had come to connote, not divine ordinance,
but human appetites, and natural rights were invoked by the
individualism of the age as a reason why self-interest should
be given free play.

The effect of these practical exigencies and intellectual
changes was seen in a reversal of policy on the part of the
State. In 1571 the Act of 1552, which had prohibited all
interest as a "vyce moste odyous and detestable, as in dy-
vers places of the hollie Scripture it is evydent to be seen,"
had been repealed, after a debate in the House which re-
vealed the revolt of the plain man against the theorists who
had triumphed twenty years before, and his determination
that the law should not impose on business a Utopian moral-
ity.84 The exaction of interest ceased to be a criminal offense,
provided that the rate did not exceed ten per cent., though it
still remained open to a debtor, in the improbable event of
his thinking it expedient to jeopardize his chance of future
advances, to take civil proceedings to recover any payment
made in excess of the principal. This qualified condonation
of usury on the part of the State naturally reacted upon re-
ligious opinion The Crown was supreme ruler of the Church
of Christ, and it was not easy for a loyal Church to be more
fastidious than its head. Moderate interest, if without legal
protection, was at any rate not unlawful, and it is difficult to
damn with conviction vices of which the degrees have been
adjusted on a sliding scale by an Act of Parliament. Objec-
tive economic science was beginning its disillusioning career,
in the form of discussions on the rise in prices, the mech-
anism of the money-market, and the balance of trade, by
publicists concerned, not to point a moral, but to analyze
forces so productive of profit to those interested in their
operation. Since Calvin's indulgence to interest, critics of
the traditional doctrine could argue that religion itself
spoke with an uncertain voice.

Such developments inevitably affected the tone in which
the discussion of economic ethics was carried on by the di-
vines, and even before the end of the sixteenth century,
though they did not dream of abandoning the denunciation
of unconscionable bargains, they were surrounding it with
qualifications. The Decades of Bullinger, of which three
English translations were made in the ten years following
his death, and which Convocation in 1586 required to be ob*
tained and studied by all the inferior clergy, indicated a

154 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

via media. As uncompromising as any medieval writer in his
hatred of the sin of covetousness, he denounces with all the
bid fervor oppressive contracts which grind the poor. But
he is less intolerant of economic motives than most of his
predecessors, and concedes, with Calvin, that, before inter-
est is condemned as usury, it is necessary to consider both
the terms of the loan and the position of borrower and
lender.

The stricter school of religious opinion continued to cling
to the traditional theory down to the Civil War. Conserva-
tive divines took advantage of the section in the Act of 1571
declaring that "all usurie being forbydden by the lawe of
God is synne and detestable," to argue that the Statute had
in reality altered nothing, and that the State left it to the
Church to prevent bargains which, for reasons of practical
expediency, it did not think fit to prohibit, but which it did
not encourage and declined to enforce It is in obedience to
such doctrines that a scrupulous parson refuses a cure until
he is assured that the money which will be paid to him comes
from the rent of land, not from interest on capital. 8r> But,
even so, there are difficulties The parson of Kingham be-
queaths a cow to the poor of Burford, which is uset to hire
for a year or two for four shillings a year," the money
used for their assistance. Cows are mortal, and this com-
munal cow is uvery like to have perished through casualty
and ill-keeping " 8(' Will not the poor be surer of their money
if the cow is disposed of for cash down? So it is sold to the
man who previously hired it, and the interest spent on the
poor instead. Is this usury? Is it usury to invest money in
business in order to provide an income for those, like wid-
ows and orphans, who cannot trade with it themselves? If
it is lawful to buy a rent-charge or to share in trading prof-
its, what is the particular criminality of charging a price
for a loan? Why should a creditor, who may himself be poor,
make a loan gratis, in order to put money into the pocket of
a wealthy capitalist, who uses the advance to corner the
wool crop or to speculate on the exchanges?

To such questions liberal theologians answered that the
crucial point was not the letter of the law which forbad the
breeding of barren metal, but the observance of Christian
charity in economic, as in other, transactions. Their oppo-
nents appealed to the text of Scripture and the law of the
Church, argued that usury differed, not merely in degree, but

THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM 155

in kind, from payments which, like rent and profits, were
morally unobjectionable provided that they were not extor-
tionate in amount, and insisted that usury was to be inter-
preted as "whatever is taken for a loan above the principal.'*
The literature of the subject was voluminous. But it was ob-
solete almost before it was produced. For, whether theolo-
gians and moralists condemned all interest, or only some in-
terest, as contrary to Christian ethics, the assumption im-
plied in their very disagreement had been that economic
relations belonged to a province of which, in the last resort,
the Church was master. That economic transactions were
one department of ethical conduct, and to be judged, like
other parts of it, by spiritual criteria; that, whatever con-
cessions the State might see fit to make to human frailty, a
certain standard of economic morality was involved in mem-
bership of the Christian Church; that it was the function
of ecclesiastical authorities, whoever they might be, to take
the action needed to bring home to men their social obliga-
tions— such doctrines were still common ground to all sec-
tions of religious thought. It was precisely this whole con-
ception of a social theory based ultimately on religion which
was being discredited. While rival authorities were discuss-
ing the correct interpretation of economic ethics, the flank
of both was turned by the growth of a powerful body of
lay opinion, which argued that economics were one thing
and ethics another.

Usury, a summary name for all kinds of extortion, was the
issue in which the whole controversy over "good conscience"
in bargaining came to a head, and such questions were only
one illustration of the immense problems with which the
rise of a commercial civilization confronted a Church whose
social ethics still professed to be those of the Bible, the
Fathers and the Schoolmen. A score of books, garnished with
citations from Scripture and from the canonists, were written
to answer them. Many of them are learned ; some are almost
readable. But it may be doubted whether, even in their own
day, they satisfied any one but their authors. The truth is
that, in spite of the sincerity with which it was held that
the transactions of business must somehow be amendable to
the moral law, the code of practical ethics, in which that
claim as expressed, had been forged to meet the conditions
of a very different environment from that of commercial
England in the seventeenth century.

156 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

The most crucial and the most difficult of all political
questions is that which turns on the difference between public
and private morality. The problem which it presents in the
relations between States is a commonplace. But, since its
essence is the difficulty of applying the same moral standard
to decisions which affect large masses of men as to those in
which only individuals are involved, it emerges in a hardly
less acute form in the sphere of economic life, as soon as its
connections ramify widely, and the unit is no longer the
solitary producer, but a group To argue, in the manner of
Machiavelli, that there is one rule for business and another
for private life, is to open a door to an orgy of unscrupulous-
ness before which the mind recoils. To argue that there is no
difference at all is to lay down a principle which few men
who have faced the difficulty in practice will be prepared to
endorse as of invariable application, and incidentally to ex-
pose the idea of morality itself to discredit by subjecting it
to an almost intolerable strain. The practical result of sen-
timentality is too often a violent reaction toward the baser
kinds of Realpoliiik.

With the expansion of finance and international trade in
the sixteenth century, it was this problem which faced the
Church. Granted that I should love my neighbor as myself,
the questions which, under modern conditions of large-scale
organization, remain for solution are, Who precisely is my
neighbor? and, How exactly am I to make my love for him
effective in practice? To these questions the conventional re-
ligious teaching supplied no answer, for it had not even real-
ized that they could be put. It had tried to moralize economic
relations by treating every transaction as a case of personal
conduct, involving personal responsibility. In an age of im-
personal finance, world-markets and a capitalist organiza-
tion of industry, its traditional social doctrines had no spe-
cific to offer, and were merely repeated, when, in order to be
effective, they should have been thought out again from the
beginning and formulated in new and living terms. It had
endeavored to protect the peasant and the craftsman against
the oppression of the money-lender and the monopolist.
Faced with the problems of a wage-earning proletariat, it
could do no more than repeat, with meaningless iteration, its
traditional lore as to the duties of master to servant and
servant to master. It had insisted that all men were breth-
ren. But it did not occur to it to point out that, as a result

THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM 157

of the new economic imperialism which was beginning to
develop in the seventeenth century, the brethren of the Eng-
lish merchant were the Africans whom he kidnaped for slav-
ery in America, or the American Indians whom he stripped
of their lands, or the Indian craftsmen from whom he bought
muslins and silks at starvation prices. Religion had not yet
learned to console itself for the practical difficulty of applying
its moral principles by clasping the comfortable formula that
for the transaction of economic life no moral principles exist.
But, for the problems involved in the association of men for
economic purposes on the grand scale which was to be in-
creasingly the rule in the future, the social doctrines ad-
vanced from the pulpit offered, in their traditional form,
little guidance. Their practical ineffectiveness prepared the
way for their theoretical abandonment.

They were abandoned because, on the whole, they deserved
to be abandoned. The social teaching of the Church had
ceased to count, because the Church itself had ceased to
think. Energy in economic action, realist intelligence in eco-
nomic thought — these qualities were to be the note of the
seventeenth century, when once the confusion of the Civil
War had died down When mankind is faced with the choice
between exhilarating activities and piety imprisoned in a
shriveled mass of desiccated formulae, it will choose the for-
mer, though the energy be brutal and the intelligence narrow.
In the age of Bacon and Descartes, bursting with clamorous
interests and eager ideas, fruitful, above all, in the germs of
economic speculation, from which was to grow the new sci-
ence of Political Arithmetic, the social theory of the Church
of England turned its face from the practical world, to pore
over doctrines which, had their original authors been as im-
pervious to realities as their later exponents, would never
have been formulated. Naturally it was shouldered aside. It
was neglected because it had become negligible.

The defect was fundamental. It made itself felt in coun-
tries where there was no Reformation, no Puritan movement,
no common law jealous of its rights and eager to prune ec-
cleastical pretensions. But in England there were all three,
and, from the beginning of the last quarter of the sixteenth
century, ecclesiastical authorities who attempted to enforce
traditional morality had to reckon with a temper which de-
nied their right to exercise any jurisdiction at all, above all,
any jurisdiction interfering with economic matters. It was

158 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

not merely that there was the familiar objection of the plain
man that parsons know nothing of business — that "it is not
in simple divines to show what contract is lawful and what
is not." 87 More important, there was the opposition of the
common lawyers to part, at least, of the machinery of ecclesi-
astical discipline. Bancroft in 1605 complained to the Privy
Council that the judges were endeavoring to confine the
jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts to testamentary and
matrimonial cases, and alleged that, of more than five hun-
dred prohibitions issued to stop proceedings in the Court of
Arches since the accession of Elizabeth, not more than one
in twenty could be sustained.88 "As things are," wrote two
years later the author of a treatise on the civil and ecclesias-
tical law, "neither jurisdiction knowes their owne bounds,
but one snatcheth from the other, in maner as in a batable
ground lying betweene two kingdomes " 89 The jurisdiction
of the Court of High Commission suffered in the same way.
In the last resort appeals from the ecclesiastical courts went
either to it or to the Court of Delegates. From the latter part
of the sixteenth century down to the removal of Coke from
the Bench in 1616, the judges were from time to time stay-
ing proceedings before the Court of High Commission by
prohibitions, or discharging offenders imprisoned by it. In
1577, for example, they released on a writ of Habeas Corpus
a prisoner committed by the High Commission on a charge
of usury.90

Most fundamental of all, there was the growth of a theory
of the Church, which denied the very principle of a disci-
pline exercised by bishops and archdeacons. The acquies-
cence of the laity in the moral jurisdiction of the clergy had
been accorded with less and less readiness for two centuries
before the Reformation. With the growth under Elizabeth of
a vigorous Puritan movement, which had its stronghold
among the trading and commercial classes, that jurisdiction
became to a considerable proportion of the population little
less than abhorrent. Their dislike of it was based, of course,
on weightier grounds than its occasional interference in mat-
ters of business. But their attitude had as an inevitable re-
sult that, with the disparagement of the whole principle of
the traditional ecclesiastical discipline, that particular use of
it was also discredited. It was not that Puritanism implied
a greater laxity in social relations. On the contrary, in its
earlier phases it stood, at least in theory, for a stricter disci-

THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM 159

pline of the life of the individual, alike in his business and in
his pleasures. But it repudiated as anti-Christian the organs
through which such discipline had in fact been exercised.
When the Usury Bill of 1571 was being discussed in the
House of Commons, reference to the canon law was met
by the protest that the rules of the canon law on the matter
were abolished, and that "they should be no more remem-
bered than they are followed." 91 Feeling against the system
rose steadily during the next two generations; excommuni-
cations, when courts ventured to resort to them, were freely
disregarded;92 and by the thirties of the seventeenth century,
under the influence of Laud's regime, the murmur was
threatening to become a hurricane. Then came the Long
Parliament, the fierce denunciations in both Houses of the
interference of the clergy in civil affairs, and the legislation
abolishing the Court of High Commission, depriving the or-
dinary ecclesiastical courts of penal jurisdiction, and finally,
with the abolition of episcopacy, sweeping them away al-
together.

"Not many good days," wrote Penn, "since ministers med-
dled so much in laymen's business." 'J>i That sentiment was a
dogma on which, after the Restoration, both Cavalier and
Roundhead could agree. It inevitably reacted, not only upon
the practical powers of the clergy, which in any case had
long been feeble, but on the whole conception of reKgion
which regarded it as involving the control of economic self-
interest by what Laud had called "the body of the Church."
The works of Sanderson and of Jeremy Taylor, continuing
an earlier tradition, reasserted with force and eloquence the
view that the Christian is bound by his faith to a rule of life
which finds expression in equity in bargaining and in works
of mercy to his neighbors.04 But the conception that the
Church possessed, of its own authority, an independent
standard of social values, which it could apply as a crite-
rion to the practical affairs of the economic world, grew
steadily weaker. The result, neither immediate nor intended,
but inevitable, was the tacit denial of spiritual significance
in the transactions of business and in the relations of or-
ganized society. Repudiating the right of religion to advance
any social theory distinctively its own, that attitude became
itself the most tyrannical and paralyzing of theories. It may
be called Indifferentism.

The change had begun before the Civil War. It was com-

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

pleted with the Restoration, and, still more, with the Revo-
lution. In the eighteenth century it is almost superfluous to
examine the teaching of the Church of England as to social
ethics. For it brings no distinctive contribution, and, except
by a few eccentrics, the very conception of the Church as
an independent moral authority, whose standards may be in
sharp antithesis to social conventions, has been abandoned.

An institution which possesses no philosophy of its own
inevitably accepts that which happens to be fashionable.
What set the tone of social thought in the eighteenth century
was partly the new Political Arithmetic, which had come to
maturity at the Restoration, and which, as was to be expect-
ed in the first great age of English natural science — the age
of Newton, of Halley, and of the Royal Society— drew its
inspiration, not from religion or morals, but from mathe-
matics and physics. It was still more the political theory as-
sociated with the name of Locke, but popularized and de-
based by a hundred imitators. Society is not a community of
classes with varying functions, united to each other by mu-
tual obligations arising from their relation to a common end.
It is a joint-stock company rather than an organism, and
the liabilities of the shareholder are strictly limited. They
enter it in order to insure the rights already vested in them
by the immutable laws of nature. The State, a matter of
convenience, not of supernatural sanctions, exists for the
protection of those rights, and fulfills its object in so far as,
by maintaining contractual freedom, it secures full scope
for their unfettered exercise.

The most important of such rights are property rights,
and property rights attach mainly, though not, of course,
exclusively, to the higher orders of men, who hold the tan-
gible, material "stock1* of society. Those who do not sub-
scribe to the company have no legal claim to a share in
the profits, though they have a moral claim on the charity
of their superiors. Hence the curious phraseology which
treats almost all below the nobility, gentry and freeholders
as "the poor" — and the poor, it is well known, are of two
kinds, "the industrious poor," who work for their betters,
and "the idle poor," who work for themselves Hence the
unending discussions as to whether "the laboring poor" are
to be classed among the "productive" or "unproductive'
classes — whether they are, or are not, really worth their
keep. Hence the indignant repudiation of the suggestion that

THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM 161

any substantial amelioration of their lot could be effected
by any kind of public policy. "It would be easier, where
property was well secured, to live without money than with-
out poor, . . . who, as they ought to be kept from starving,
so they should receive nothing worth saving''; the poor
"have nothing to stir them up to be serviceable but their
wants, which it is prudence to relieve, but folly to cure";
"to make society happy, it is necessary that great numbers
should be wretched as well as poor."95 Such sentences from a
work printed in 1714 are not typical. But they are straws
which show how the wind is blowing.

In such an atmosphere temperatures were naturally low
and equable, and enthusiasm, if not a lapse in morals, was
an intellectual solecism and an error in taste. Religious
thought was not immune from the same influence. It was
not merely that the Church, which, as much as the State,
was the heir of the Revolution settlement, reproduced the
temper of an aristocratic society, as it reproduced its class
organization and economic inequalities, and was disposed too
often to idealize as a virtue that habit of mean subservience
to wealth and social position, which, after more than half
a century of political democracy, is still the characteristic
and odious vice of Englishmen. Not less significant was the
fact that, apart from certain groups and certain questions, it
accepted the prevalent social philosophy and adapted its
teaching to it. The age in which political theory was cast in
the mould of religion had yielded to one in which religious
thought was no longer an imperious master, but a docile
pupil Conspicuous exceptions like Law, who reasserted with
matchless power the idea that Christianity implies a dis-
tinctive way of life, or protests like Wesley's sermon on
The Use of Money, merely heighten the impression of a
general acquiescence in the conventional ethics. The prev-
alent religious thought might not unfairly be described as
morality tempered by prudence, and softened on occasion by
a rather sentimental compassion for inferiors. It was the
natural counterpart of a social philosophy which repudiated
teleology, and which substituted the analogy of a self-regu-
lating mechanism, moved by the weights and pulley of eco-
nomic motives, for the theory which had regarded society
as an organism composed of different classes united by their
common subordination to a spiritual purpose.

Such an attitude, with its emphasis on the economic bar-

162 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

mony of apparently conflicting interests, left small scope for
moral casuistry. The materials for the reformer were, indeed,
abundant enough. The phenomena of early commercial cap-
italism— consider only the orgy of financial immorality
which culminated in 1720 — were of a kind which might have
been expected to shock even the not over-sensitive conscience
of the eighteenth century. Two centuries before, the Fug-
gers had been denounced by preachers and theologians; and,
compared with the men who engineered the South Sea Bub-
ble, the Fuggers had been innocents. In reality, religious
opinion was quite unmoved by the spectacle. The traditional
scheme of social ethics had been worked out in a simpler
age; in the commercial England of banking, and shipping,
And joint-stock enterprise, it seemed, and was called, a
Gothic superstition. From the Restoration onward it was
quietly dropped. The usurer and engrosser disappear from
episcopal charges. In the popular manual called The Whole
Duty of Man,96 first published in 1658, and widely read
during the following century, extortion and oppression still
figure as sins, but the attempt to define what they are is
frankly abandoned. If preachers have not yet overtly iden-
tified themselves with the view of the natural man, expressed
by an eighteenth-century writer in the words "trade is one
thing and religion is another," they imply a not very differ-
ent conclusion by their silence as to the possibility of col-
lisions between them. The characteristic doctrine was one,
in fact, which left little room for religious teaching as to
economic morality, because it anticipated the theory, later
epitomized by Adam Smith in his famous reference to the
invisible hand, which saw in economic self-interest the op-
eration of a providential plan. "National commerce, good
morals and good government," wrote Dean Tucker, of whom
Warburton unkindly said that religion was his trade, and
trade his religion, "are but part of one general scheme, in
the designs of Providence."

Naturally, on such a view, it was unnecessary for the
Church to insist on commercial morality, since sound moral-
ity coincided with commercial wisdom. The existing order,
except in so far as the short-sighted enactments of Govern-
ments interfered with it, was the natural order, and the
order established by nature was the order established by
God. Most educated men, in the middle of the centurv,

THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM 163

would have found their philosophy expressed in the lines of

P ' Thus God and Nature formed the general frame,
And bade self-love and social be the same.

Naturally, again, such an attitude precluded a critical ex-
amination of institutions, and left as the sphere of Christian
charity only those parts of life which could be reserved for
philanthropy, precisely because they fell outside that larger
area of normal human relations, in which the promptings of
self-interest provided an all-sufficient motive and rule of
conduct. It was, therefore, in the sphere of providing succor
for the non-combatants and for the wounded, not in inspir-
ing the main army, that the social work of the Church was
conceived to lie. Its characteristic expressions in the eight-
eenth century were the relief of the poor, the care of the
sick, and the establishment of schools. In spite of the genu-
ine, if somewhat unctuous, solicitude for the spiritual welfare
of the poorer classes, which inspired the Evangelical revival,
religion abandoned the fundamental brain-work of criticism
and construction to the rationalist and the humanitarian.
Surprise has sometimes been expressed that the Church
should not have been more effective in giving inspiration
and guidance during the immense economic reorganization to
which tradition has assigned the not very felicitous name of
the "Industrial Revolution." It did not give it, because it did
not possess it. There were, no doubt, special conditions to
account for its silence — mere ignorance and inefficiency, the
supposed teachings of political economy, and, after 1790,
the terror of all humanitarian movements inspired by France.
But the explanation of its attitude is to be sought, less in
the peculiar circumstances of the moment, than in the prev-
alence of a temper which accepted the established order of
class relations as needing no vindication before any higher
tribunal, and which made religion, not its critic or its ac-
cuser, but its anodyne, its apologist, and its drudge. It was
not that there was any relapse into abnormal inhumanity.
It was that the very idea that the Church possessed an inde-
pendent standard of values, to which social institutions were
amenable, had been abandoned. The surrender had been
made long before the battle began. The spiritual blindness
which made possible the general acquiescence in the horrors
of the early factory system was, not a novelty, but the habit
of a centurv.

CHAPTER IV

The Puritan Movement

"And the Lorde was with Joseph, and he was a luckie lelowe "
Genets xxxix 2 (Tyndale's translation)

BY the end of the sixteenth century the divorc^ between
religious theorylmd eTOn^^i^ rp^jit^g ..HaH inng b£g^ evi-
dent. But ill the meantime, within the bosom of religious
tlieuiyltself, a new system of ideas was being matured,
which was destined to revolutionize all traditional values,
and to turn on the whole field of social obligations a new
and penetrating light. On a world heaving with expanding
energies, and a Church uncertain of itself, rose, after two
generations of premonitory mutterings, the tremendous
storm of the Puritan movement. The forest bent; the oaks
snapped; the dry leaves were driven before a gale, neither
all of winter nor all of spring, but violent and life-giving,
pitiless and tender, sounding strange notes of yearning and
contrition, as of voices wrung from a people dwelling in
Meshec, which signifies Prolonging, in Kedar, which signi-
fies Blackness; while amid the blare of trumpets, and the
clash of arms, and the rending of the carved work of the
Temple, humble to God and hauty to man, the soldier-saints
swept over battlefield and scaffold their garments rolled in
blood.

In the great silence which fell when the Titans had turned
to dust, in the Augustan calm of the eighteenth century, a
voice was heard to observe that religious liberty was a con-
siderable advantage, regarded "merely in a commercial
view." * A new world, it was evident, had arisen. And this
new world, born of the vision of the mystic, the passion of
the prophet, the sweat and agony of heroes famous and un-
known, as well as of mundane ambitions and commonplace
cupidities, was one in which, since "Thorough'7 was no
more, since property was secure, and contracts inviolable,
and the executive tamed, the judicious investments of busi-
ness men were likely to wield a profitable return. So the
epitaph, which crowns the life of what is called success,
mocks the dreams in which youth hungered, not for success,
but for the glorious failure of the martyr or the saint.

164

PURITANISM AND SOCIETY 1<SS

I. PURITANISM AND SOCIETY

The principal streams which descended in England from
the teaching of Calvin were three — Presbyterianism, Con-
gregationalism, and a doctrine of the nature of God aiwl
man, which, if common to both, was more widely diffused,
more pervasive and more potent than either. Of these three
off-shoots from the parent stem, the first and eldest, which
had made some stir under Elizabeth, and which it was
hoped, with judicious watering from the Scotch, might grow
into a State Church, was to produce a credal statement
carved in bronze, but was to strike, at least in its original
guise, but slender roots. The second, with its insistence on
the right of every Church to organize itself, and on the free-
dom of all Churches from the interference of the State, was
to leave, alike in the Old World and in the New, an imper-
ishable legacy of civil and religious liberty. The third was
Puritanism Straitened to no single sect, and represented in'
the Anglican Church hardly, if at all, less fully than in
those which afterwards separated from it, it determined, not
only conceptions of theology and church government, but
political aspirations, business relations, family life and the
minutiae of personal behavior.

The growth, triumph and transformatjnp of thfi PuritAf>
spirit was the nmst fqndamental movement of the-seven-
teentlTcentury. Puritanism, not the Tudor secession from
RomeTwas fEeTtrue English Reformation, and it is from its
struggle against the old order that an England which is
unmistakably modern emerges. But, immense as were its
accomplishments on the higher stage of public affairs, its
achievements in that inner world, of which politics are but
the squalid scaffolding, were mightier still Like an iceberg,
which can awe the traveller by its towering majesty only
because sustained by a vaster mass which escapes his eye,
the revolution which Puritanism wrought in Church and
State was less than that which it worked in men's souls, and
the watchwords which it thundered, amid the hum of Par-
liaments and the roar of battles, had been learned in the
lonely nights, when Jacob wrestled with the angel of the
Lord to wring a blessing before he fled.

We do it wrong, being so majestical
To offer it the show of violence.

166 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT

In the mysticism of Bunyan and Fox, in the brooding mel-
ancholy and glowing energy of Cromwell, in the victorious
tranquillity of Milton, "unshaken, unseduced, un terrified,"
amid a world of self-seekers and apostates, there are depths
of light and darkness which posterity can observe with
reverence or with horror, but which its small fathom-line
cannot plumb.

There are types of character which are like a prism, whose
various and brilliant colors are but broken reflections of a
single ray of concentrated light. If the inward and spiritual
grace of Puritanism eludes the historian, its outward and
visible signs meet him at every turn, and not less in market-
place and counting-house and camp than in the student's
chamber and the gathering of the elect for prayer. For to
the Puritan, a contemner of the vain shows of saciamen-
talism, mundane toil becomes itself a kind of sacrament. Like
a man who strives by unresting activity to exorcise a haunt-
ing demon, the Puritan, in the effort to save his own soul,
sets in motion every force in heaven above or in the earth
beneath. By the mere energy of his expanding spirit, he
remakes, not only his own character and habits and way of
life, but family and church, industry and city, political insti-
tutions and social order. Conscious that he is but a stranger
and pilgrim, hurrying from this transitory life to a life to
come, he turns with almost physical horror from the vanities
which lull into an awful indifference souls dwelling on the
borders of eternity, to pore with anguish of spirit on the
grand facts, God, the soul, starvation and damnation. "It
made the world seem to me," said a Puritan of his conver-
sion, "as a carkass that had neither life nor loveliness. And
it destroyed those ambitious desires after literate fame,
which was the sin of my childhood. ... It set me upon
that method of my studies which since then I have found
the benefit of. ... It caused me first to seek God's King-
dom and his Righteousness, and most to mind the One thing
needful, and to determine first of my Ultimate End." 2

Overwhelmed by a sense of his "Ultimate End," the
Puritan cannot rest, nevertheless, in reflection upon it. The
contemplation of God, which the greatest of the Schoolmen
described as the supreme blessedness, is a blessedness too
great for sinners, who must not only contemplate God, but
glorify him by their work in a world given over to the pow-

PURITANISM AND SOCIETY lfit

ers of darkness. "The way to the Celestial City lies just
through this town, where this lusty fair is kept; and he
that will go to the City, and yet not go through this town,
must needs go out of the world/' 3 For that awful journey,
girt with precipices and beset with fiends, he sheds every
encumbrance, and arms himself with every weapon. Amuse-
ments, books, even intercourse with friends, must, if need
be, be cast aside; for it is better to enter into eternal life
halt and maimed than having two eyes to be cast into eter-
nal fire. He scours the country, like Baxter and Fox, to find
one who may speak the word of life to his soul. He seeks
from his ministers, not absolution, but instruction, exhorta-
tion and warning. Prophesyings — that most revealing episode
in early Puritanism — were the cry of a famished generation
for enlightenment, for education, for a religion of the intel-
lect; and it was because much "preaching breeds faction,
but much praying causes devotion" 4 that the powers of this,
world raised their parchment shutters to stem the gale that
blew from the Puritan pulipt. He disciplines, rationalizes,
systematizes, his life; "method" was a Puritan catchword a
century before the world had heard of Methodists. He makes
his very business a travail of the spirit, for that too is the
Lord's vineyard, in which he is called to labor.

Feeling in him that which "maketh him more fearful of
displeasing God than all the world," r> he is a natural repub-
lican, for there is none on earth that he can own as master.
If powers and principalities will hear and obey, well; if not,
they must be ground into dust, that on their ruins the elect
may build the Kingdom of Christ. And, in the end, all these
— prayer, and toil, and discipline, mastery of self and mas-
tery of others, wounds, and death — may be too little for the
salvation of a single soul. "Then I saw that there was a way
to Hell even from the Gates of Heaven, as well as from the
City of Destruction" 6 — those dreadful words haunt him as
he nears his end. Sometimes they break his heart. More
often, for grace abounds even to the chief of sinners, they
nerve his will. For it is will — will organized and disciplined
and inspired, will quiescent in rapt adoration or straining in
violent energy, but always will — which is the essence of
Puritanism, and for the intensification and organization of
will every instrument in that tremendous arsenal of religious
fervour is mobilized. The Puritan is like a steel spring com-

168 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT

pressed by an inner force, which shatters every obstacle by
its rebound. Sometimes the strain is too tense, and, when
its imprisoned energy is released, it shatters itself.

The spirit bloweth where it listeth, and men of every so-
cial grade had felt their hearts lifted by its breath, from
aristocrats and country gentlemen to weavers who, "as they
stand in their loom, can set a book before them or edifie
one another." 7 But, if religious zeal and moral enthusiasm
are not straitened by the vulgar categories of class and in-
come, experience proves, nevertheless, that there are certain
kinds of environment in which they burn more bravely than
in others, and that, as man is both spirit and body, so dif-
ferent types of religious experience correspond to the vary-
ing needs of different social and economic milieux. To
contemporaries the chosen seat of the Puritan spirit seemed
to be those classes in society which combined economic inde-
pendence, education and a certain decent pride in their
status, revealed at once in a determination to live their own
lives, without truckling to earthly superiors, and in a some-
what arrogant contempt for those who, either through weak-
ness of character or through economic helplessness, were less
resolute, less vigorous and masterful, than themselves. Such,
where the feudal spirit had been weakened by contact with
town life and new intellectual currents, were some of the
gentry. Such, conspicuously, were the yeomen, "mounted on
a high spirit, as being slaves to none," 8 especially in the
freeholding counties of the east. Such, above all, were the
trading classes of the towns, and of those rural districts
which had been partially industrialized by the decentraliza-
tion of the textile and iron industries.

"The King's cause and party," wrote one who described
the situation in Bristol in 1645, "were favored by two ex-
tremes in that city; the one, the wealthy and powerful men,
the other, of the basest and lowest sort; but disgusted by
the middle rank, the true and best citizens " 9 That it was
everywhere these classes who were the standard-bearers of
Puritanism is suggested by Professor Usher's statistical es-
timate of the distribution of Puritan ministers in the first
decade of the seventeenth century, which shows that, of 281
ministers whose names are known, 35 belonged to London
and Middlesex, 96 to the three manufacturing counties of
Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, 29 to Northamptonshire, 17 to

PURITANISM AND SOCIETY 169

Lancashire, and only 104 to the whole of the rest of the
country.10 The phenomenon was so striking as to evoke the
comments of contemporaries absorbed in matters of pro-
founder spiritual import than sociological generalization.
"Most of the tenants of these gentlemen," wrote Baxter,
"and also most of the poorest of the people, whom the other
called the Rabble, did follow the gentry, and were for the
King. On the Parliament's side were (besides themselves)
the smaller part (as some thought) of the gentry in most of
the counties, and freeholders, and the middle sort of men;
especially in those corporations and counties which depend
on cloathing and such manufactures." He explained the fact
by the liberalizing effect of constant correspondence with
the greater centers of trade, and cited the example of France,
where it was "the merchants and middle sort of men that
were Protestants." u

The most conspicuous example was, of course, London,
which had financed the Parliamentary forces, and which
continued down to the Revolution to be par excellence "the
rebellious city," returning four Dissenters to the Royalist
Parliament of 1661, sending its mayor and aldermen to ac-
company Lord Russell when he carried the Exclusion Bill
from the Commons to the Lords, patronizing Presbyterian
ministers long after Presbyterianism was proscribed, nursing
the Whig Party, which stood for tolerance, and sheltering
the Whig leaders against the storm which broke in 1681.
But almost everywhere, the same fact was to be observed.
The growth of Puritanism, wrote a hostile critic, was "by
meanes of the City of London (the nest and seminary of the
seditious faction) and by reason of its universall trade
throughout the kingdome, with its commodities conveying
and deriving this civill contagion to all our cities and cor-
porations, and thereby poysoning whole counties." 12 In
Lancashire, the clothing towns — "the Genevas of Lanca-
shire"— rose like Puritan islands from the surrounding sea
of Roman Catholicism. In Yorkshire, Bradford, Leeds and
Halifax; in the midlands, Birmingham and Leicester; in the
west, Gloucester, Taunton and Exeter, the capital of the
west of England textile industry, were all centers of Puri-
tanism.

The identification of the industrial and commercial classes
with religious radicalism was, indeed, a constant theme of

170 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT

Anglicans and Royalists, who found in the vices of each an
additional reason for distrusting both. Clarendon commented
bitterly on the " factious humor which possessed most cor-
porations, and the pride of their wealth";13 and, after the
Civil War, both the politics and the religion of the boroughs
were suspect for a generation. The bishop of Oxford warned
Charles II 's Government against showing them any favor,
on the ground that "trading combinations" were "so many
nests of faction and sedition," and that "our late miserable
distractions" were "chiefly hatched in the shops of trades-
men." 14 Pepys commented dryly on the black looks which
met the Anglican clergy as they returned to their City
"Churches. It was even alleged that the courtiers hailed with
glee the fire of London, as a providential instrument for
crippling the center of disaffection.15

When, after 1660, Political Arithmetic became the fash-
ion, its practitioners were moved by the experience of the
last half-century and by the example of Holland — the eco-
nomic schoolmaster of seventeenth-century Europe — to in-
quire, in the manner of any modern sociologist, into the re-
lations between economic progress and other aspects of the
national genius. Cool, dispassionate, very weary of the drum
ecclesiastic, they confirmed, not without some notes of gentle
irony, the diagnosis of bishop and presbyterian, but deduced
from it different conclusions. The question which gave a
topical point to their analysis was the rising issue of reli-
gious tolerance. Serenely indifferent to its spiritual signifi-
cance, they found a practical reason for applauding it in the
fact that the classes who were in the van of the Puritan
movement, and in whom the Clarendon Code found its most
prominent victims, were also those who led commercial and
industrial enterprise. The explanation, they thought, was
simple. A society of peasants could be homogeneous in its
religion, as it was already homogeneous in the simple uni-
formity of its economic arrangements. A many-sided business
community could escape constant friction and obstruction
only if it were free to absorb elements drawn from a multi-
tude of different sources, and if each of those elements were
free to pursue its own way of life, and — in that age the
same thing — to practice its own religion.

Englishmen, as Defoe remarked, improved everything and
invented nothing, and English economic organization had

PURITANISM AND SOCIETY 171

long been elastic enough to swallow Flemish weavers flying
from Alva, and Huguenots driven from France. But the
traditional ecclesiastical system was not equally accomodat-
ing. It found not only the alien refugee, but its homebred
sectaries, indigestible. Laud, reversing the policy of Eliza-
bethan Privy Councils, which characteristically thought
diversity of trades more important than unity of religion,
had harassed the settlements of foreign artisans at Maid-
stone, Sandwich and Canterbury,10 and the problem recurred
in every attempt to enforce conformity down to 1689. "The
gaols were crowded with the most substantial tradesmen
and inhabitants, the clothiers were forced from their houses,
and thousands of workmen and women whom they employed
set to starving." 1T The Whig indictment of the disastrous
effects of Tory policy recalls the picture drawn by French
intendants of the widespread distress which followed the
revocation of the Edict of Nantes.18

When the collision between economic interests and the
policy of compulsory conformity was so flagrant, it is not
surprising that the economists of the age should have enun-
ciated the healing principle that persecution was incompat-
ible with prosperity, since it was on the pioneers of economic
progress that persecution principally fell. "Every law of
this nature/7 wrote the author of a pamphlet on the subject,
is not only " expressly against the very principles of rules
of the Gospel of Christ," but is also "destructive to the trade
and well-being of our nation by oppressing and driving away
the most industrious working hands, and depopulating, and
thereby impoverishes our country, which is capable of em-
ploying ten times the number of people we now have." 19

Temple, in his calm and lucid study of the United Neth-
erlands, found one reason of their success in the fact that,
Roman Catholicism excepted, every man might practise what
religion he pleased.20 De la Court, whose striking book
passed under the name of John de Witt, said the same.21
Petty, after pointing out that in England the most thriving
towns were those where there was most nonconformity,
cited the evidence, not only of Europe, but of India and the
Ottoman Empire, to prove that, while economic progress is
compatible with any religion, the class which is its vehicle
will always consist of the heterodox minority, who "profess
opinions different from what are publicly established."22

172 THK PURITAN MOVEMENT

"There is a kind of natural unaptness," wrote a pamphlet-
eer in 1671, uin the Popish religion to business, whereas on
the contrary among the Reformed, the greater their zeal,
the greater their inclination to trade and industry, as hold-
ing idleness unlawful. . . . The domestic interest of England
lieth in the advancement of trade by removing all obstruc-
tions both in city and country, and providing such laws as
may help it, and make it most easy, especially in giving
liberty of conscience to all Protestant Nonconformists, and
denying it to Papists." 23

If the economists applauded tolerance because it was good
for trade, the Tory distrust of the commercial classes was
aggravated by the fact that it was they who were most vocal
in the demand for tolerance. Swift denounced, as part of the
settle odious creed, the maxim that "religion ought to make
no distinctien between Protestants" and the policy "of pre-
ferring, on all occasions, the monied interests before the
landed."24 Even later in the eighteenth century, the stale
gibe of "the Presbyterians, the Bank and the other corpora-
tions" still figured in the pamphlets of the statements whom
Lord Morley describes as the prince of political charlatans,
Bolingbroke.25

"The middle ranks," "the middle class of men," "the
middle sort" — such social strata included, of course, the
widest variety of economic interest and personal position.
But in the formative period of Puritanism, before the Civil
War, two causes prevented the phrase from being merely the
vapid substitute for thought which it is today. In the first
place, outside certain exceptional industries and districts,
there was little large-scale production and no massed prole-
tariat of propertyless wage-earners. As a result, the typical
workman was still normally a small master, who continued
himself to work at the loom or at the forge, and whose
position was that described in Baxter's Kidderminster, where
"there were none of the tradesmen very rich . . . the magis-
trates of the town were few of them worth £40 per annum,
and most not half so much; three or four of the richest
thriving masters of the trade got but about £500 to ^600
in twenty years, and it may be lost £100 of it at once by
an ill debtor." 26 Differing in wealth from the prosperous
merchant or clothier, such men resembled them in economic
and social habits, and the distinction between them was

PURITANISM AND SOCIETY 173

one of degree, not of kind. In the world of industry vertical
divisions between district and district still cut deeper than
horizontal fissures between class and class. The number of
those who could reasonably be described as independent,
since they owned their own tools and controlled their own
business, formed a far larger proportion of the population
than is the case in capitalist societies.

The second fact was even more decisive. The business
classes, as a power in the State, were still sufficiently yoking
to be conscious of themselves as something like a separate
order, with an outlook on religion and politics peculiarly
their own, distinguished, not merely by birth and breeding,
but by their social habits, their business discipline, the whole
bracing atmosphere of their moral life, from a Court which
they believed to be godless and an aristocracy which they
knew to be spendthrift. The estrangement — for it was no
more — was of shorter duration in England than in any other
European country, except Switzerland and Holland. By the
latter part of the seventeenth century, partly as a result of
the common struggles which made the Revolution, still more
perhaps through the redistribution of wealth by commerce
and finance, the former rivals were on the way to be com-
pounded in the gilded clay of a plutocracy embracing both.
The landed gentry were increasingly sending their sons into
business; "the tradesman meek and much a liar" looked
forward, as a matter of course, to buying an estate from a
bankrupt noble. Georgian England was to astonish foreign
observers, like Voltaire and Montesquieu, as the Paradise
of the bourgeoisie, in which the prosperous merchant shoul-
dered easily aside the impoverished bearers of aristocratic
names.27

That consummation, however, was subsequent to the great
divide of the Civil War, and, in the main, to the tamer
glories of the Revolution. In the germinating period of Puri-
tanism, the commercial classes, though powerful, were not
yet the dominant force which a century later they were to
become. They could look back on a not distant past, in
which their swift rise to prosperity had been regarded with
suspicion, as the emergence of an alien interest, which ap-
plied sordid means to the pursuit of anti-social ends — an
interest for which in a well-ordered commonwealth there
was little room, and which had been rapped on the knuckles

174 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT

by conservative statesmen. They lived in a present, where a
Government, at once interfering, inefficient and extravagant,
cultivated, with an intolerable iteration of grandiloquent
principles, every shift and artifice most repugnant to the
sober prudence of plain-dealing men. The less reputable
courtiers and the more feather-pated provincial gentry, while
courting them to raise a mortgage or renew a loan, reviled
them as parvenus, usurers and blood-suckers. Even in the
latter part of the seventeenth century, the influence of the
rentier and of the financier still continued to cause appre-
hension and jealousy, both for political and for economic
reasons. "By this single stratagem," wrote an indignant
pamphleteer of the Puritan capitalists who specialized in
money-lending, "they avoyd all contributions of tithes and
taxes to the King, Church, Poor (a soverain cordial to ten-
der consciences) ; they decline all services and offices of
burthen incident to visible estates; they escape all oaths
and ties of publick allegiance or private fealty. . . . They
enjoy both the secular applause of prudent conduct, and
withal the spiritual comfort of thriving easily and devoutly
. . . leaving their adversaries the censures of improvidence,
together with the misery of d<*cay. They keep many of the
nobility and gentry in perfect vassalage (as their poor copy-
holders), which eclipses honour, enervates justice and oft-
times protects them in their boldest conceptions. By en-
grossing cash and credit, they in effect give the price to land
and law to markets. By commanding ready money, they
likewise command such offices as they widely affect . . . they
feather and enlarge their own nests, the corporations " 2S

Such lamentations, the protest of senatorial dignity against
equestrian upstarts or of the noblesse against the roturier,
were natural in a conservative aristocracy, which for a cen-
tury had felt authority and prestige slipping from its grasp,
and which could only maintain its hold on them by resign-
ing itself, as ultimately it did, to sharing them with its rival.
In return, the business world, which had its own religious
and political ideology, steadily gathered the realities of
power into its own hands; asked with a sneer, "how would
merchants thrive if gentlemen would not be unthriftes";29
and vented the indignant contempt felt by an energetic, suc-
cessful and, according to its lights, not too unscrupulous,
generation for a class of jaineants, unversed in the new

PURITANISM AND SOCIETY 17§

learning of the City and incompetent to the verge of im-
morality in the management of business affairs. Their tri-
umphs in the past, their strength in the present, their con-
fidence in the future, their faith in themselves, and their
difference from their feebler neighbours — a diffrence as of
an iron wedge in a lump of clay — made them, to use a mod-
ern phrase, class-conscious. Like the modern proletarian,
who feels that, whatever his personal misery and his present
disappointments, the Cause is rolled forward to victory by
the irresistible force of an inevitable evolution, the Puritan
bourgeoisie knew that against the chosen people the gates
of hell could not prevail. The Lord prospered their doings.
There is a magic mirror in which each order and organ of
society, as the consciousness of its character and destiny
dawns upon it, looks for a moment, before the dust of con-
flict or the glamour of success obscures its vision. In that
enchanted glass, it sees its own lineaments reflected with
ravishing allurements; for what it sees is not what it is, but
what in the eyes of mankind and of its own heart it would
be. The feudal noblesse had looked, and had caught a
glimpse of a world of fealty and chivalry and honor. The
monarchy looked, or Laud and Strafford looked for if; they
saw a nation drinking the blessings of material prosperity
and spiritual edification from the cornucopia of a sage and
paternal monarchy — a nation "fortified and adorned . . .
the country rich . . . the Church flourishing . . . trade in-
creased to that degree that we were the exchange of Chris-
tendom ... all foreign merchants looking upon nothing as
their own but what they laid up in the warehouses of this
Kingdom." 30 In a far-off day the craftsman and laborer
were to look, and see a band of comrades, where fellowship
should be known for life and lack of fellowship for death,
For the middle classes of the early seventeenth century,
rising but not yet triumphant, that enchanted mirror was
Puritanism. What it showed was a picture grave to stern-
ness, yet not untouched with a sober exaltation — an earnest,
zealous, godly generation, scorning delights, punctual in
labor, constant in prayer, thrifty and thriving, filled with a
decent pride in themselves and their calling, assured that
strenuous toil is acceptable to Heaven, a people like those
Dutch Calvinists whose economic triumphs were as famous
as their iron Protestantism — " thinking, sober, and patient

176 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT

men, and such as believe that labor and industry is their
duty toward God." 31 Then an air stirred and the glass was
dimmed. It was long before any questioned it again.

II. A GODLY DISCIPLINE versus THE RELIGION OF TRADE

Puritanism was the schoolmaster of the English middle
classes. It heightened their virtues, sanctified, without erad-
icating, their convenient vices, and gave them an inexpug-
nable assurance that, behind virtues and vices alike, stood
the majestic and inexorable laws of an omnipotent Provi-
dence, without whose foreknowledge not a hammer could
beat upon the forge, not a figure could be ackied to the
ledger. But it is a strange school which does not leach more
than one lesson, and the social reactions of Puritanism,
trenchant, permanent and profound, are not to be summa-
rized in the simple formula that it fostered individualism.
Weber, in a celebrated essay, expounded the thesis that
Calvinism, in its English version, was the parent of capital-
ism, and Troeltsch, Schulze-Gaevernitz and Cunnigham
have lent to the same interpretation the weight of their
considerable authority.32 But the heart of man holds mys-
teries of contradiction which live in vigorous incompatabil-
ity together. When the shriveled tissues lie in our hand, the
spiritual bond still eludes us.

In every human soul there is a socialist and an individ-
ualist, an authoritarian and a fanatic for liberty, as in each
there is a Catholic and a Protestant. The same is true of the
mass movements in which men marshal themselves for com-
mon action. There was in Puritanism an element which was
conservative and traditionalist, and an element which was
revolutionary; a collectivism which grasped at an iron disci-
pline, and an individualism which spurned the savorless
mess of human ordinances; a sober prudence which would
garner the fruits of this world, and a divine recklessness
which would make all things new. For long nourished to-
gether, their discords concealed, in the furnace of the Civil
War they fell apart, and Presbyterian and Independent,
aristocrat and Leveller, politician and merchant and Utopian,
gazed with bewildered eyes on the strange monsters with
whom they had walked as friends. Then the splendors and
illusions vanished; the force of common things prevailed;

A GODLY DISCIPLINE 177

the metal cooled in the mould; and the Puritan spirit, shorn
of its splendors and its illusions, settled finally into its de-
cent bed of equitable respectability. But each element in its
social philosophy had once been as vital as the other, and
the battle was fought, not between a Puritanism solid for
one view and a State committed to another, but between
rival tendencies in the soul of Puritanism itself. The prob-
lem is to grasp their connection, and to understand the rea-
sons which caused this to wax and that to wane

"The triumph of Puritanism," it has been said, "swept
away all traces of any restriction or guidance in the em-
ployment of money."33 That it swept away the restrictions
imposed by the existing machinery is true; neither ecclesi-
astical courts, nor High Commission, nor Star Chamber,
could function after 1640. But, if it broke the discipline of
the Church of Laud and the State of Strafford, it did so but
as a step towards erecting a more rigorous discipline of its
own. It would have been scandalized by economic individual-
ism as much as by religious tolerance, and the broad outlines
of its scheme of organization favored unrestricted liberty in
matters of business as little as in the things of the spirit.
To the Puritan of any period in the century between the
accession of Elizabeth and the Civil War, the suggestion that
he was the friend of economic or social license would have
seemed as wildly inappropriate as it would have appeared
to most of his critics, who taunted him, except in the single
matter of usury, with an intolerable meticulousness.

A godly discipline was, indeed, the very ark of the Puritan
covenant. Delivered in thunder to the Moses of Geneva, its
vital necessity had been the theme of the Joshuas of Scot-
land, England and France. Knox produced a Scottish edition
of it ; Cart wright, Travers and Udall composed treatises ex-
pounding it. Bancroft exposed its perils for the established
ecclesiastical order.34 The word "discipline" implied essen*
tially "a directory of Church government," established in
order that "the wicked may be corrected with ecclesiastical
censures, according to the quality of the fault",35 and the
proceedings of Puritan classes in the sixteenth century show
that the conception of a rule of life, to be enforced by the
pressure of the common conscience, and in the last resort
by spiritual penalties, was a vital part of their system.
When- at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, the sectaries in

178 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT

London described their objects as not merely the "free and
pur*" preaching of the Gospel, nor the pure ministration of
the sacraments, but "to have, not the fylthye canon lawe,
but disciplyne onelye and altogether agreeable to the same
heavenlye and Allmightye word of our good Lorde Jesus
Chryste," ™ the antithesis suggests that something more
than verbal instruction is intended. Bancroft noted that it
was the practice, when a sin was committed by one of the
faithful, for the elders to apply first admonishment and then
excommunication. The minute-book of one of the few classes
whose records survive confirms his statement 7

All this early movement had almost flickered out before
the end of the sixteenth century. But the conception lay at
the very root of Presbyterianism, and it reemerged in the
system of church government which the supercilious Scotch
Commissioners at the Westminster Assembly steered to in-
conclusive victory, between Erastians on the right and
Independents on the left. The destruction of the Court of
High Commission, of the temporal jurisdiction of all persons
in Holy Orders, and finally, with the abolition of episcopacy,
of the ecclesiastical courts themselves, left a vacuum. "Mr.
Henderson," wrote the insufferable Baillie, "has ready now
a short treatise, much called for, of our church discipline." 3fi
In June 1646 an unenthusiastic Parliament accepted the
ordinance which, after a three years' debate of intolerable
tedium, emerged from the Assembly's Committee on the
Discipline and Government of the Church, and which pro-
vided for the suspension by the elders of persons guilty of
scandalous offences. Detested by the Independents and
cold-shouldered by Parliament, which had no intention of
admitting the divine right of presbyteries, the system never
took deep root, and in London, at least, there appears to
be no evidence of any exercise of jurisdiction by elders or
classes. In parts of Lancashire, on the other hand, it seems
to have been actively at work, down, at any rate, to 1649.
The change in the political situation, in particular the tri-
umph of the army, prevented it, Mr. Shaw thinks, from
functioning longer.59

"Discipline" included all questions of moral conduct, and
of these, in an age when a great mass of economic relations
were not the almost automatic reactions of an impersonal
mechanism, but a matter of human kindliness or meanness

A GODLY DISCIPLINE 179

between neighbors in village or borough, economic conduct
was naturally part. Calvin and Beza, perpetuating with a
new intensity the medieval idea of a Church-civilization, had
sought to make Geneva a pattern, not only of doctrinal
purity, but of social righteousness and commercial morality.
Those who had drunk from their spring continued, in even
less promising environments, the same tradition. Bucer, who
wrote when something more fundamental than a politician's
reformation seemed possible to enthusiasts with their eyes
on Geneva, had urged the reconstruction of every side of
the economic life of a society which was to be Church and
State in one.40 English Puritanism, while accepting after
some hesitation Calvin's much qualified condonation of
moderate interest, did not intend in other respects to coun-
tenance a laxity welcome only to worldlings. Knewstub ap-
pealed to the teaching of "that worthy instrument of God,
Mr. Calvin," to prove that the habitual usurer ought to be
"thrust out of the society of men." Smith embroidered the
same theme. Baro, whose Puritanism lost him his professor-
ship, denounced the "usual practice amongst rich men, and
some of the greater sort, who by lending, or by giving out
their money to usury, are wont to snare and oppress the
poor and needier sort." Cartwright, the most famous leader
of Elizabethan Puritanism, described usury as "a hainous
offence against God and his Church," and laid down that
the offender should be excluded from the sacraments until
he satisfied the congregation of his penitenance.41 The ideal
of all was that expressed in the apostolic injunction to be
content with a modest competence and to shun the allure-
ments of riches. "Every Christian man is bound in conscience
before God," wrote Stubbes, "to provide for his household
and family, but yet so as his immoderate care surpasse not
the bands, nor yet transcend the limits, of true Godlynes.
... So farre from covetousnes and from immoderate care
would the Lord have us, that we ought not this day to care
for tomorrow, for (saith he) sufficient to the day is the
travail of the same." 42

The most influential work on social ethics written in the
first half of the seventeenth century from the Puritan stand-
point was Ames' De Conscientia, a manual of Christian con-
duct which was intended to supply the brethren with the
practical guidance which had been offered in the Middle

180 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT

Ages by such works as Dives et Pauper. It became a stand-
ard authority, quoted again and again by subsequent writers.
Forbidden to preach by the bishop of London, Ames spent
more than twenty years in Holland, where he held a chair
of theology at the University of Franeker, and his experi-
ence of social life in the country which was then the business
capital of Europe makes the remorseless rigor of his social
doctrine the more remarkable. He accepts, as in his day was
inevitable, the impossibility of distinguishing between inter-
est on capital invested in business, and interest on capital
invested in land, since men put money indifferently into
both, and, like Calvin, he denies that interest is forbidden
in principle by Scripture or natural reason. But, like Calvin,
he surrounds his indulgence with qualifications ; he requires
that no interest shall be charged on loans to the needy, and
describes as the ideal investment for Christians one in which
the lender shares risks with the borrower, and demands only
"a fair share of the profits, according to the degree in which
God has blessed him by whom the money is used." His
teaching with regard to prices is not less conservative "To
wish to buy cheap and to sell dear is common (as Augustine
observes), but it is a common vice." Men must not sell
above the maximum fixed by public authority, though they
may sell below it, since it is fixed to protect the buyer;
when there is no legal maximum, they must follow the mar-
ket price and "the judgment of prudent and good men."
They must not take advantage of the necessities of individ-
ual buyers, must not overpraise their wares, must not sell
them dearer merely because they have cost them much to
get.43 Puritan utterances on the subject of enclosing were
equally trenchant.44

Nor was such teaching merely the pious pedantry of the
pulpit. It found some echo in contrite spirits; it left some
imprint on the conduct of congregations. If D'Ewes was the
unresisting victim of a more than ordinarily aggressive con-
science, he was also a man of the world who played a not
inconspicuous part in public affairs; and D'Ewes not only
ascribed the fire which destroyed his father's house to the
judgment of Heaven on ill-gotten gains, but expressly pre-
scribed in his will that, in order to avoid the taint of the
accursed thing, provision should be made for his daughters,
not by investing his capital at a fixed — and therefore usuri-

A GODLY DISCIPLINE 181

ous — rate of interest, but by the purchase either of land or
of annuities.45 The classis which met at Dedham in the
eighties of the sixteenth century was concerned partly with
questions of ceremony, of church government, of the right
use of Sunday, and with the weighty problems whether boys
of sixteen might wear their hats in church, and by what
marks one might detect a witch. But it discussed also what
provision could be made to check vagrancy; advised the
brethren to confine their dealings to "the godliest of that
trade" (of cloth making) ; recommended the establishment
in the township of a scheme of universal education, that of
children of parents too poor to meet the cost being defrayed
from collections made in church; and urged that each well-
to-do householder should provide in his home for two (or,
if less able, one) of his impoverished neighbors who "walke
christianly and honestlie in their callinges." 46 In the ever-
lengthening list of scandalous and notorious sins to be pun-
ished by exclusion from the sacrament, which was elaborated
by the Westminster Assembly, a place was found, not only
for drunkards, swearers, and blasphemers, worshippers and
makers of images, senders or carriers of challenges, persons
dancing, gaming, attending plays on the Lord's day, or re-
sorting to witches, wizards and fortune-tellers, but for the
more vulgar vices of those who fell into extortion, barratry
and bribery.47 The classis of Bury in Lancashire (quantum
mutatusl) took these economic lapses seriously. It decided
in 1647, after considerable debate, that "usury is a scandal-
ous sin, deserving suspention upon obstinacy." 48

It was a moment when good men were agog to cast the
money-changers from the temple and to make straight the
way of the Lord. "God hath honnored you in callinge you
to a place of power and trust, and hee expects that you
should bee faith full to that trust. You are postinge to the
grave every day; you dwell upon the borders of eternity;
your breath is in your nostrells; therfore duble and treble
your resolutions to bee zealous in a good thinge. . . . How
dreadful will a dieinge bed bee to a negligent magistrate!
What is the reward of a slothfull servant? Is it not to bee
punished with everlastinge destruction from the presence of
the Lord?"49 Such, in that singular age, was the language
in which the mayor of Salisbury requested the justices of

182 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT

Wiltshire to close four public-houses. Apparently they closed
them.

The attempt to crystallize social morality in an objective
discipline was possible only in a theocracy; and, still elo-
quent in speech, theocracy had abdicated in fact, even before
the sons of Belial returned to cut down its groves and lay
waste its holy places. In an age when the right to dissent
from the State Church was still not fully established, its
defeat was fortunate, for it was the victory of tolerance. It
meant, however, that the discipline of the Church gave place
to the attempt to promote reform through the action of the
State, which reached its height in the Barebones Parliament.
Projects for law reform, marriage reform and financial re-
form, the reform of prisons and the relief of debtors, jostled
each other on its committees; while outside it there were
murmurs among radicals against social and economic priv-
ilege, which were not to be heard again till the days of the
Chartists, and which to the conservative mind of Cromwell
seemed to portend mere anarchy. The transition from the
idea of a moral code enforced by the Church, which had
been characteristic of early Calvinism, to the economic in-
dividualism of the later Puritan movement took place, in
fact, by way of the democratic agitation of the Independents
Abhorring the whole mechanism of ecclesiastical discipline
and compulsory conformity, they endeavored to achieve the
same social and ethical ends by political action.

The change was momentous. If the English Social Demo-
cratic movement has any single source, that source is to be
found in the New Model Army. But the conception implied
in the attempt to formulate a scheme of economic ethics —
the theory that every department of life falls beneath the
same all-encompassing arch of religion — was too deeply root-
ted to be exorcised merely by political changes, or even by
the more corroding march of economic development. Ex-
pelled from the world of fact, where it had always been a
stranger and a sojourner, it survived in the world of ideas,
and its champions in the last half of the century labored it
the more, precisely because they knew that it must be con-
veyed to their audiences by teaching and preaching or not
at all. Of those champions the most learned, the most prac-
tical, and the most persuasive was Richard Baxter.

How Baxter endeavored to give practical instruction to

A GODLY DISCIPLINE 183

his congregation at Kidderminster, he himself has told us.
" Every Thursday evening my neighbours that were most
desirous and had opportunity met at my house, and there
one of them repeated the sermon, and afterwards they pro-
posed what doubts any of them had about the sermon, or
anv other case of conscience, and 1 resolved their doubts." 50
Both in foim and in matter, his Christian Dhectory, or a
Summ of Practical Theologie and Cases of Conscience51 is
a remarkable book. It is, in essence, a Puritan Summ a The-
ologtca and Summa Mordis in one, its method of treatment
descends directly from that of the medieval Swnmae, and it
is, perhaps, the last important English specimen of a famous
genus. Its object, as Baxter explains in his introduction, is
"the resolving of practical cases of conscience, and the re-
ducing of theoretical knowledge into serious Christian prac-
tice." Divided into four parts, Ethics, Economics, Ecclesi-
astics, and Politics, it has as its purpose to establish the
rules of a Christian casuistry, which may be sufficiently de-
tailed and precise to afford practical guidance to the proper
conduct of men in the different relations of life, as lawyer,
physician, schoolmaster, soldier, master and servant, buyer
and seller, landlord and tenant, lender and borrower, ruler
and subject Part of its material is derived from the treat-
ment of similar questions by previous writers, both before
and after the Reformation, and Baxter is conscious of con-
tinuing a great tradition But it is, above all things, realis-
tic, and its method lends plausibility to the suggestion that
it originated in an attempt to answer practical questions put
to its author by members of his congregation. Its aim is not
to overwhelm by authority, but to convince by an appeal to
the enlightened common sense of the Christian reader. It
does not overlook, therefore, the practical facts of a world
in which commerce is carried on by the East India Company
in distant markets, trade is universally conducted on credit,
the iron manufacture is a large-scale industry demanding
abundant supplies of capital and offering a profitable open-
ing to the judicious investor, and the relations of landlords
and tenants have been thrown into confusion by the fire of
London. Nor does it ignore the moral qualities for the cul-
tivation of which an opportunity is offered by the life of
business. It takes as its starting-point the commercial en-

184 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT

vironment of the Restoration, and its teaching is designed
for "Rome or London, not Fools' Paradise."

Baxter's acceptance of the realities of his age makes the
content of his teaching the more impressive. The attempt to
formulate a casuistry of economic conduct obviously implies
that economic relations are to be regarded merely as one
department of human behavior, for which each man is mor-
ally responsible, not as the result of an impersonal mech-
anism, to which ethical judgments are irrelevant. Baxter
declines, therefore, to admit the convenient dualism, which
exonerates the individual by representing his actions as the
outcome of uncontrollable forces. The Christian, he insists,
is committed by his faith to the acceptance of certain ethical
standards, and these standards are as obligatory in the sphere
of economic transactions as in any other province of human
activity. To the conventional objection that religion has
nothing to do with business — that "every man will get as
much as he can have and that caveat emptor is the only
security" — he answers bluntly that this way of dealing does
not hold among Christians. Whatever the laxity of the law,
the Christian is bound to consider first the golden rule and
the public good. Naturally, therefore, he is debarred from
making money at the expense of other persons, and certain
profitable avenues of commerce are closed to him at the
outset. "It is not lawful to take up or keep up any oppress-
ing monopoly or trade, which tends to enrich you by the
loss of the Commonwealth or of many."

But the Christian must not only eschew the obvious extor-
tion practiced by the monopolist, the engrosser, the organizer
of a corner or a combine. He must carry on his business
in the spirit of one who is conducting a public service; he
must order it for the advantage of his neighbor as much as,
and, if his neighbor be poor, more than, for his own. He
must not desire "to get another's goods or labour for less
than it is worth." He must not secure a good price for his
own wares "by extortion working upon men's ignorance,
error, or necessity." When prices are fixed by law, he must
strictly observe the legal maximum; when they are not, he
must follow the price fixed by common estimation. If he finds
a buyer who is willing to give him more, he "must not make
too great an advantage of his convenence or desire, but be
glad that fhe] can pleasure him upon equal, fair, and honest

A GODLY DISCIPLINE 185

terms/' for "it is a false rule of them that think their com-
modity is worth as much as any one will give." If the seller
forsees that in the future prices are likely to fall, he must
not make profit out of his neighbour's ignorance, but must
tell him so. If he forsees that they will rise, he may hold
his wares back, but only — a somewhat embarrassing excep-
tion— if it be not "to the hurt of the Commonwealth, as if
. . . keeping it in be the cause of the dearth, and . . . bring-
ing it forth would help to prevent it." If he is buying from
the poor, "charity must be exercised as well as justice";
the buyer must pay the full price that the goods are worth
to himself, and, rather than let the seller suffer because he
cannot stand out for his price, should offer him a loan or
persuade some one else to do so. In no case may a man
doctor his wares in order to get for them a higher price than
they are really worth, and in no case may he conceal any
defects of quality; if he was so unlucky as to have bought
an inferior article, he "may not repair [his] loss by doing
as [he | was done by, ... no more than [he] may cut
another's purse because [his] was cut." Rivalry in trade,
Baxter thinks, is inevitable But the Christian must not
snatch a good bargain "out of greedy covetousness, nor to
the injury of the poor . . . nor ... so as to disturb that
due and civil order which should be among moderate men
in trading." On the contrary, if "a covetous oppressor"
offer a poor man less than his goods are worth, "it may be
a duty to offer the poor man the worth of his commodity
and save him from the oppressor."

The principles which should determine the contract be-
tween buyer and seller are applied equally to all other
economic relations. Usury, in the sense of payment for a
loan, is not in itself unlawful for Christians. But it becomes
so, when the lender does not allow the borrower "such a
proportion of the gain as his labour, hazard, or poverty doth
require, but . . . will live at ease upon his labours"; or when,
in spite of the borrower's misfortune, he rigorously exacts
his pound of flesh; or when interest is demanded for a loan
which charity would require to be free. Masters must disci-
pline their servants for their good; but it is "an odious
oppression and injustice to defraud a servant or labourer of
his wages, yea, or to give him less than he deserveth." As
the descendant of a family of yeomen, "free," as he says,

186 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT

"from the temptations of poverty and riches," 52 Baxter had
naturally strong views as to the ethics of land-owning. Sig-
nificantly enough, he deals with them under the general
rubric of "Cases of oppression, especially of tenants," op-
pression being defined as the "injuring of inferiors who are
unable to resist or to right themselves." "It is too common
a sort of oppression for the rich in all places to domineer
too insolently over the poor, and force them to follow their
wills and to serve their interest, be it right or wrong. . . .
Especially unmerciful landlords are the common and sore
oppressors of the countrymen. If a few men can but get
money enough to purchase all the land in a country, they
think that they may do with their own as they list, and set
such hard bargains of it to their tenants, that they are all
but as their servants. ... An oppressor is an Anti-Christ
and an Anti-God ... not only the agent of the Devil, but
his image." As in his discussion of prices, the gist of Bax-
ter's analysis of the cases of conscience which arise in the
relations of landlord and tenant is that no man may secure
pecuniary gain for himself by injuring his neighbor. Except
in unusual circumstances, a landlord must not let his land
at the full competitive rent which it would fetch in the mar-
ket: "Ordinarily the common sort of tenants in England
should have so much abated of the fullest worth that they
may comfortably live on it, and follow their labours with
cheerfulness of mind and liberty to serve God in their fam-
ilies, and to mind the matters of their salvation, and not to
be necessitated to such toil and care and pinching want as
shall make them liker slaves than free men." He must not
improve (i.e., enclose) his land without considering the ef-
fect on the tenants, or evict his tenants without compen-
sating them, and in such a way as to cause depopulation;
nor must a newcomer take a holding over the sitting ten-
ant's head by offering "a greater rent than he can give or
than the landlord hath just cause to require of him." The
Christian, in short, while eschewing "causeless, perplexing,
melancholy scruples, which would stop a man in the course
of his duty," must so manage his business as to "avoid sin
rather than loss," and seek first to keep his conscience in
peace.

The first characteristic to strike the modern reader in all
this teaching is its conservatism. In spite of the economic

A GODLY DISCIPLINE 187

and political revolutions of the past two centuries, how small,
after all, the change in the presentation of the social ethics
of the Christian faith! A few months after the appearance
of the Christian Directory, the Stop of the Exchequer tore
a hole in the already intricate web of London finance, and
.sent a shiver through the money-markets of Europe. But
Baxter, though no mere antiquarian, discourses of equity in
bargaining, of just prices, of reasonable rents, of the sin of
usury, in the same tone, if not with quite the same conclu-
sions, as a medieval Schoolman, and he differs from one of
the later Doctors, like St. Antomno, hardly more than St.
Antonino himself had differed from Aquinas Seven years
later Bunyan published The Life and Death of MJ . Badman.
Among the vices which it pilloried were the sin of extortion,
"most commonly committed by men of trade, who without
all conscience, when they have an advantage, will make a
prey of their neighbour," the covetousness of "hucksters,
that buy up the poor man's victual wholesale and sell it to
him again for unreasonable gains," the avarice of usurers,
who watch till "the poor fail into their mouths," and "of
those vile wretches called pawn-brokers, that lend money
and goods to poor people, who are by necessity forced to
such an inconvenience, and will make by one trick or an-
other the interest of what they so lend amount to thirty and
forty, yea, sometimes fifty pounds by the year " As Christian
and Christiana watched Mr. Badman thus bite and pinch
the poor in his shop in Bedford, before they took staff and
scrip for their journey to a more distant City, they remem-
bered that the Lord himself will plead the cause of the
afflicted against them that oppress them, and reflected,
taught by the dealings of Ephron the son of Zohar, and
of David with Ormon the Jebusite, that there is a "wicked-
ness, as in selling too dear, so in buying too cheap." 5a
Brother Berthold of Regensburg had said the same foul
centuries before in his racy sermons in Germany. The
emergence of the idea that "business is business," and that
the world of commercial transactions is a closed compart-
ment with laws of its own, if more ancient than is often
supposed, did not win so plainless a triumph as is sometimes
suggested. Puritan as well as Catholic accepted without
demur the view which set all human interests and activities
within the compass of religion. Puritans, as well as Cath-

188 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT

olics, essayed the formidable task of formulating a Christian
casuistry of economic conduct.

They essayed it But they succeeded even less than the
Popes and Doctors whose teaching, not always unwittingly,
they repeated. And their failure had its roots, not merely
in the obstacles offered by the ever more recalcitrant opposi-
tion of a commercial environment, but, like all failures which
are significant, in the soul of Puritanism itself. Virtues are
often conquered by vices, but their rout is most complete
when it is inflicted by other virtues, more militant, more
efficient, or more congenial, and it is not only tares which
choke the ground where the good seed is sown The funda-
mental question, after all, is not what kind of rules a faith
enjoins, but what type of character it esteems and cultivate5*
To the scheme of Christian ethics which offered admonition*
against the numberless disguises assumed by the sin which
sticketh fast between buying and selling, the Puritan char-
acter offered, not direct opposition, but a polished surface
on which these irhnstlv admonitions ronVl find no enduring
foothold The rules of Christian morality elaborated by Bax-
ter were subtle and sincere But they were like seeds carried
by birds from a distant and fertile plain, and dropped upon
a glacier They were at once embalmed and sterilized in a
river of ice

"The capitalist «pint" is as old as history, and was not,
as has sometimes been said, the offspring of Puritanism
But it found in certain aspects of later Puritanism a tonic
which braced its energies and fortified its already vigorous
temper At first sight, no contrast could be more violent than
that between the iron collectivism, the almost military disci-
pline the remorseless and violent rigors practiced in Calvin's
Geneva, and preached elsewhere if in a milder form by his
disciples, and the impatient rejection of all traditional re-
strictions on economic enterprise which was the temper of
the English business world after the Civil War In reality
the same ingredients were present throughout, but they were
mixed in chansms: proportions, and exposed to different
temperatures at different times Like traits of individual
character which are suppressed till the approach of maturity
releases them, the tendencies in Puritanism, which were to
make it later a potent ally of the movement against the
control of economic relations in the name either of social

TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES 189

morality or o! the public interest, did not reveal themselves
till political and economic changes had prepared a congenial
environment for their growth. Nor, once those conditions
were created, was it only England which witnessed the trans-
formation. In all countries alike, in Holland, in America, in
Scotland, in Geneva itself, the social theory of Calvinism
went through the same process of development. It had begun
by being the very soul of authoritarian regimentation. It
ended by being the vehicle for an almost Utilitarian in-
dividualism While social reformers in the sixteenth century
could praise Calvin for his economic rigor, their successors
in Restoration England, if of one persuasion, denounced him
as the parent of economic license, if of another, applauded
Calvinist communities for their commercial enterprise and
for their freedom from antiquated prejudices on the subject
of economic morality So little do those who shoot the arrows
of the spirit know where they will light.

Ill THE TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES

"One beam in a dark place," wrote one who knew the
travail of the spirit, "hath exceeding much refreshment in it.
Blessed be His name for shining upon so dark a heart as
mine." 54 While the revelation of God to the individual soul
is the center of all religion, the essence of Puritan theology
was that it made it, not only the center, but the whole cir-
cumference and substance, dismissing as dross and vanity
all else but this secret and solitary communion Grace alone
can save, and this grace is the direct gift of God, unmediated
by any earthly institution. The elect cannot by any act of
their own evoke it; but they can prepare their hearts to
receive it, and cherish it when received They will prepare
them best, if they empty them of all that may disturb the
intentness of their lonely vigil. Like an engineer, who, to
canalize the rush of the oncoming tide, dams all channels
save that through which it is to pour, like a painter who
makes light visible by plunging all that is not light in gloom,
the Puritan attunes his heart to the voice from Heaven by
an immense effort of concentration and abnegation To win
all, he renounces all. When earthly props have been cast
down, the soul stands erect in the presence of God. Infinity
is attained by a process of subtraction.

190 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT

To a vision thus absorbed in a single intense experience,
not only religious and ecclesiastical systems, but the entire
world of human relations, the whole fabric of social institu-
tions, witnessing in all the wealth of their idealism and their
greed to the infinite creativeness of man, reveal themselves
in a new and wintry light. The fire of the spirit burns
brightly on the hearth; but through the windows of his soul
the Puritan, unless a poet or a saint, looks on a landscape
touched by no breath of spring. What he sees is a forbidding
and frost-bound wilderness, rolling its snow-clad leagues to-
wards the grave — a wilderness to be subdued with aching
limbs beneath solitary stars. Through it he must take his
way, alone. No aid can avail him. no preacher, for only the
elect can apprehend with the spirit the word of God, no
Church, for to the visible Church even reprobates belong;
no sacrament, for sacraments are ordained to increase the
glory of God, not to minister spiritual nourishment to man;
hardly God himself, for Christ died for the elect, and it may
well be that the majesty of the Creator is revealed by the
eternal damnation of all but a remnant of the created V)

His life is that of a soldier in hostile territory He suffers
in spirit the perils which the first settlers in America en-
dured in body, the sea behind, the untamed desert in front,
a cloud of inhuman enemies on either hand Where Catholic
and Anglican had caught a glimpse of the invisible, hovering
like a consecration over the gross world of sense, and touch-
ing its muddy vesture with the unearthly gleam of a divine,
yet familiar, beauty, the Puritan mourned for a lost Para-
dise and a creation sunk in sin. Where they had seen society
as a mystical body, compact of members varying in order
and degree, but dignified by participation in the common
life of Christendom, he saw a bleak antithesis between the
spirit which quickened and an alien, indifferent or hostile
world. Where they had reverenced the decent order whereby
past was knit to present, and man to man, and man to God,
through fellowship in works of charity, in festival and fast,
in the prayers and ceremonies of the Church, he turned with
horror from the filthy rags of human righteousness. Where
they, in short, had found comfort in a sacrament, he started
back from a snare set to entrap his soul.

We receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live

TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES 191

Too often, contemning the external order as unspiritual, he
made it, and ultimately himself, less spiritual by reason of
his contempt.

Those who seek God in isolation from their fellowmen,
unless trebly armed for the perils of the quest, are apt to
find, not God, but a devil, whose countenance bears an em-
barrassing resemblance to their own The moral self-suf-
ficiency of the Puritan nerved his will, but it corroded his
sense of social solidarity. For, if each individual destiny
hangs on a private transaction between himself and his
Maker, what room is left for human intervention? A serv-
ant of Jehovah more than of Christ, he revered God as a
Judge rather than loved him as a Father, and was moved
less by compassion for his erring brethren than by impatient
indignation at the blindness of vessels of wrath who usinned
their mercies." A spiritual aristocrat, who sacrined fraternity
to liberty, he drew from his idealization of personal respon-
sibility a theory of individual rights, which, secularized and
generalized, was to be among the most potent explosives
that the world has known. He drew from it also a scale of
ethical values, in which the traditional scheme of Christian
virtues was almost exactly reversed, and which, since he was
above all things practical, he carried as a dynamic into the
routine of business and political life.

For, since conduct and action, though availing nothing to
attain the free gift of salvation, are a proof that the gift has
been accorded, what is rejected as a means is resumed as a
consequence, and the Puritan flings himself into practical
activities with the daemonic energy of one who, all doubts
allayed, is conscious that he is a sealed and chosen vessel.
Once engaged in affairs, he brings to them both the qualities
and limitations of his creed in all their remorseless logic.
Called by God to labor in his vineyard, he has within him-
self a principle at once of energy and of order, which makes
him h resistible both in war and in the struggles of com-
merce. Convinced that character is all and circumstances
nothing, he sees in the poverty of those who fall by the way,
not a misfortune to be pitied and relieved, but a moral fail-
ing to be condemned, and in riches, not an object of sus-
picion— though like other gifts they may be abused — but
the blessing which rewards the triumph of energy and will.
Tempered by self-examination, self-discipline, self-control,

192 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT

he is the practical ascetic, whose victories are won not in
the cloister, but on the battlefield, in the counting-house,
and in the market.

This temper, of course with infinite varieties of quality
and emphasis, found its social organ in those middle and
commercial classes who were the citadel of the Puritan
spirit, and whom, "ennobled by their own industry and vir-
tue," 50 Milton described as the standard-bearers of progress
and enlightenment We are so accustomed to think of Eng-
land as par excellence the pioneer of economic progress, that
we are apt to forget how recently that role has been as-
sumed Tn the Middle Ages it belonged to the Italians, in
the sixteenth century to the Netherland dominions of the
Spanish Empire, in the seventeenth to the United Provinces
and, above all, to the Dutch

The England of Shakespeare and ?>acon was still largely
medieval in its economic organization and social outlook
more interested in maintaining cu^omarv standards of con-
sumption than in accumulating capital for future production,
with an aristocracy contemptuous of the economic virtues,
a peasantry farming for subsistence amid the organized con-
fusion of the open-field village, and a small, if growing,
body of jealously conservative craftsmen Tn such a society
Puritanism worked like the yeast which sets the whole mass
fermenting It went through its slack and loosely knit tex-
ture like a troop of Cromwell's Ironsides through the dis-
orderly cavalry of Rupert Where, as in Ireland, the elements
were so alien that assimilation was out of the question, the
result was a wound that festered for three centuries Tn
England the effect was that at once of an irritant and of
a tonic. Puritanism had its own standards of social conduct,
derived partly from the obvious interests of the commercial
classes, partly from its conception of the nature of God and
the destiny of man These standards were in sharp antithesis,
both to the considerable surviving elements of feudalism in
English society, and to the policy of the authoritarian State,
with its ideal of an ordered and graded society, whose dif-
ferent members were to be maintained in their traditional
status by the pressure and protection of a paternal mon-
archy. Sapping the former by its influence and overthrowing
the latter by direct attack, Puritanism became a potent

TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES 193

force in preparing the way for the commercial civilization
which finally triumphed at the Revolution.

The complaint that religious radicalism, which aimed at
upsetting the government of the Church, went hand in hand
with an economic radicalism, which resented the restraints
on individual self-interest imposed in the name of religion or
of social policy, was being made by the stricter school of re-
ligious opinion quite early in the reign of Elizabeth. r>T Sev-
enteenth-century writers repeated the charge that the Pur-
itan conscience lost its delicacy where matters of business
were concerned, and some of them were sufficiently struck
by the phenomenon to attempt an historical explanation of
it The example on which they usually seized — the symbol
of a supposed general disposition to laxity — was the indul-
gence shown by Puritan divines in the particular matter of
moderate interest It was the effect, so the picturesque story
ran/'s of the Marian persecution The refugees who fled the
continent could not start business in a foreign country. If,
driven by necessity, they invested their capital and lived on
the proceeds, who could quarrel with so venial a lapse in so
good a cause? Subsequent writers embellished the picture.
The redistribution of property at the time of the Dissolu-
tion, and the expansion of trade in the middle of the century,
had led, one of them argued, to a great increase in the vol-
ume of credit transactions The opprobrium which attached
to loans at interest — "a sly and forbid practice11 — not only
among Romanists and Anglicans, but among honest Puri-
tans, played into the hands of the less scrupulous members
of "the faction " Disappointed in politics, they took to mon-
ey-lending, and, without venturing to justify usury in the-
ory, defended it in practice "Without the scandal of a re-
cantation, they contrived an expedient, by maintaining that,
though usury for the name were stark naught, yet for wid-
ows, orphans and other impotents (therein principally com-
prising the saints under persecution) it was very tolerable,
because profitable, and in a manner necessary." Naturally,
Calvin's doctrine as to the legitimacy of moderate interest
was hailed by these hypocrites with a shout of glee 'Tt took
with the brethren like polygamy with the Turks, recom-
mended by the example of divers zealous ministers, who
themselves desired to pass for orphans of the first rank." 59
Nor was it only as the apologist of moderate interest that

194 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT

Puritanism was alleged to reveal the cloven hoof. Puritans
themselves complained of a mercilessness in driving hard
bargains, and of a harshness to the poor, which contrasted
unfavorably with the practice of followers of the unreformed
religion. "The Papists," wrote a Puritan in 1653, "may rise
up against many of this generation. It is a sad thing that they
should be more forward upon a bad principle than a Chris-
tian upon a good one " <}"

Such, in all ages, is history as seen by the political pam-
phleteer. The real story was less dramatic, but more signifi-
cant. From the very beginning, Calvinism had comprised
two elements, which Calvin himself had fused, but which
contained the seeds of future discord. It had at once given
a whole-hearted imprimatur to the life of business enterprise,
which most earlier moralists had regarded with suspicion,
and had laid upon it the restraining hand of an inquisitorial
discipline. At Geneva, where Calvinism was the creed of a
small and homogeneous city, the second aspect had predom-
inated; in the many-sided life of England, where there were
numerous conflicting interests to balance it, and where it
was long politically weak, the first. Then, in the late six-
teenth and early seventeenth centuries, had come the wave
of commercial and financial expansion — companies, colonies,
capitalism in textiles, capitalism in mining, capitalism in
finance — on the crest of which the English commercial
classes, in Calvin's day still held in leading-strings by con-
servative statesmen, had climbed to a position of dignity
and affluence.

Naturally, as the Puritan movement came to its own,
these two elements flew apart. The collectivism half-commu-
nistic aspect, which had never been acclimatized in England,
quietly dropped out of notice, to crop up once more, and for
the last time, to the disgust and terror of merchant and land-
owner, in the popular agitation under the Commonwealth.
The individualism congenial to the world of business be-
came the distinctive characteristic of a Puritanism which
had arrived, and which, in becoming a political force, was at
once secularized and committed to a career of compromise.
Its note was not the attempt to establish on earth a "King-
dom of Christ," but an ideal of personal character and con-
duct, to be realized by the punctual discharge both of public

TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES 195

and private duties. Its theory had been discipline ; its prac-
tical result was liberty.

Given the social and political conditions of England, the
transformation was inevitable. The incompatibility of Pres-
byterianism with the stratified arrangement of English so-
ciety had been remarked by Hooker (>1 Tf the City Fathers
of Geneva had thrown off by the beginning of the seventeenth
century the religious collectivism of Calvin's regime, it was
not to be expected that the landowners and bourgeoisie of an
aristocratic and increasingly commercial nation, however
much Calvinist theology might appeal to them, would view
with favor the social doctrines implied in Calvinist disci-
pline. In the reign of the first two Stuarts, both economic
interests and political theory pulled them hard in the oppo-
site direction. "Merchants' doings," the man of business in
Wilson's Discourse upon Uusury had observed, "must not
thus be overthwarted by preachers and others that cannot
skill of their dealings " (>J Behind the elaborate facade of Tu-
dor State control, which has attracted the attention of his-
torians, an individualist movement had been steadily devel-
oping, which found expression in opposition to the tradition-
al policy of stereotyping economic relations by checking
enclosure, controlling food supplies and prices, interfering
with the money-market, and regulating the conditions of
the wage contract and of apprenticeship. In the first forty
years of the seventeenth century, on grounds both of expe-
diency and of principle, the commercial and propertied
classes were becoming increasingly restive undet the whole
system, at once ambitious and inefficient, of economic pater-
nalism It was in the same sections of the community that
both religious and economic dissatisfaction were most acute.
Puritanism, with its idealization of the spiritual energies
which found expression in the activities of business and in-
dustry, drew the isolated rivulets of discontent together, and
swept them forward with the dignity and momentum of a
religious and a social philosophy.

For it was not merely as the exponent of certain tenets as
to theology and church government, but as the champion of
interests and opinions embracing every side of the life of
society, that the Puritan movement came into collision with
the Crown. In reality, as is the case with most heroic ideol-
ogies, the social and religious aspects of Puritanism were not

196 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT

disentangled; they presented themselves, both to supporters
and opponents, as different facets of a single scheme. "All
that crossed the views of the needy courtiers, the proud en-
croaching priests, the thievish projectors, the lewd nobility
and gentry . . . whoever could endure a sermon, modest habit
or conversation, or anything good — all these were Puri-
tans." <( ' The clash was not one of theories— a systematic and
theoretical individualism did not develop till after the Resto-
ration— but of contradictory economic interests and incom-
patible conceptions of social expediency.

The economic policy haltingly pursued by the Government
of Charles 1 bore some resemblance to the system ot which
a more uncompromising version was developed between 1661
and 1685 by Colbert in France. It was one which favored
an artificial and State-promoted capitalism — a capitalism
resting on the grant of privileges and concessions to com-
pany promoters who would pay for them, and accompanied
by an elaborate system of State control, which again, if
partly inspired by a genuine solicitude for the public inter-
est, was too often smeared with an odious trail of finance. It
found its characteristic expression in the grant of patents, in
the revival of the royal monopoly of exchange business,
against which the City had fought under Elizabeth, in at-
tempts to enforce by administrative action compliance with
the elaborate and impracticable code controlling the textile
trades and to put down speculation in foodstuffs, and in
raids on enclosing landlords, on employers who paid in truck
or evaded the rates fixed by assessment, and on justices who
were negligent in the administration of the Poor Laws Such
measures were combined with occasional plunges into even
more grandiose schemes for the establishment of county
granaries, for taking certain industries into the hands of the
Crown, and even for the virtual nationalization of the cloth
manufacture."04

"The very genius of that nation of people," wrote Strafford
to Laud of the Puritans, "leads them always to oppose, as
well civilly as ecclesiastically, all that ever authority or-
dains for them." <ir> Against this whole attempt to convert
economic activity into an instrument of profit for the Gov-
ernment and its hangers-on — against, no less, the spasmodic
attempts of the State to protect peasants against landlords,
craftsmen against merchants, and consumers against mid-

TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES 197

dlemen — the interests which it thwarted and curbed revolted
with increasing pertinacity Questions of taxation, on which
attention has usually been concentrated, were in reality
merely one element in a quarrel which had its deeper cause
in the collision of incompatible social philosophies. The Pur-
itan tradesman had seen his business ruined by a monopoly
granted to a needy courtier, and cursed Laud and his Pop-
ish soap. The Puritan goldsmith or financier had found his
trade as a bullion-broker hampered by the reestablishment
of the ancient office of Royal Exchanger, and secured a res-
olution from the House of Commons, declaring that the
patent vesting it in Lord Holland and the proclamation for-
bidding the exchanging of gold and silver by unauthorized
persons were a grievance. The Puritan money-lender had
been punished by the Court of High Commission, and railed
at the interference of bishops in temporal affairs. The Puri-
tan clothier, who had suffered many things at the hands of
interfering busy-bodies despatched from Whitehall to teach
him his business, averted discreet eyes when the Wiltshire
workmen threw a more than usually obnoxious Royal Com-
missioner into the Avon, and, when the Civil War came, ral-
lied to the Parliament The Puritan country gentleman had
been harried by Depopulation Commissions, and took his
revenge with the meeting of the Long Parliament The Puri-
tan merchant had seen the Crown both squeeze money out of
his company, and threaten its monopoly by encouraging in-
terlopers to infringe its charter. The Puritan member of Par-
liament had invested in colonial enterprises, and had ideas
as to commercial policy which were not those of the Govern-
ment. Confident in their own energy and acumen, proud of
their success, and regarding with profound distiust the in-
terference both of Church and of State with matters of busi-
ness and property rights, the commercial classes, in spite of
their attachment to a militant mercantilism in matters of
trade, were, even before the Civil War, more than half con-
verted to the administrative nihilism which was to be the
rule of social policy in the century following ii Their de-
mand was the one which is usual in such circumstances. It
was that business affairs should be left to be settled by busi-
ness men, unhampered by the intrusions of an antiquated
morality or by misconceived arguments of public policy.66
The separation of economic from ethical interests, which

198 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT

was the note of all this movement, was in sharp opposition
to religious tradition, and it did not establish itself without
a struggle Even in the very capital of European commerce
and finance, an embittered controversy was occasioned by
the refusal to admit usurers to communion or to confer de-
grees upon them; it was only after a storm of pamphleteer-
ing, in which the theological faculty of the University of
Utrecht performed prodigies of zeal and ingenuity, that the
States of Holland and West Friesland closed the agitation
by declaring that the Church had no concern with questions
of banking fl7 In the French Calvinist Churches, the decline
of discipline had caused lamentations a generation earlier.08
In America, the theocracy of Massachusetts, merciless alike
to religious liberty and to economic license, was about to be
undermined by the rise of new States like Rhode Island and
Pennsylvania, whose tolerant, individualist and utilitarian
temper was destined to find its greatest representative in the
golden common sense of Benjamin Franklin (>q 'The sin of
our too great fondness for trade, to the neglecting of our
more valuable interests," wrote a Scottish divine in 1709,
when Glasgow was on the eve of a triumphant outburst of
commercial enterprise, "I humbly think will be written upon
our judgment . . I am sure the Lord is remarkably frown-
ing upon our trade . . . since it was put in the room of
religion " 7"

In England, the growing disposition to apply exclusively
economic standards to social relations evoked from Puritan
writers and devmes vigorous protests against usurious in-
terest, extortionate prices and the oppression of tenants by
landlords. The faithful, it was urged, had interpreted only
too literally the doctrine that the sinner was saved, not by
works, but by faith. Usury, uin time of Popery an odious
thing," n had become a scandal Professors, by their covei-
ousness, caused the enemies of the reformed religion to blas-
pheme.72 The exactions of the forestaller and regrater were
never so monstrous or so immune from interference. The
hearts of the rich were never so hard, nor the necessities of
the poor so neglected. 'The poor able to work are suffered to
beg; the impotent, aged and sick are not sufficiently provid-
ed for, but almost starved with the allowance of 3d. and 4rf.
a piece a week. . . . These are the last times indeed. Men

TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES 199

generally are all for themselves. And some would set up such,
having a form of religion, without the power of it.'' 7 '

These utterances came, however, from that part of the
Puritan mind which looked backward. That which looked
forward found in the rapidly growing spirit of economic en-
terprise something not uncongenial to its own temper, and
went out to welcome it as an ally. What in Calvin had been
a qualified concession to practical exigencies appeared in
some of his later followers as a frank idealization of the life
of the trader, as the service of God and the training-ground
of the soul. Discarding the suspicion of economic motives,
which had been as characteristic of the reformers as of me-
dieval theologians, Puritanism in its later phases added a
halo of ethical sanctification to the appeal of economic expe-
diency, and offered a moral creed, in which the duties of
religion and the calls of business ended their long estrange-
ment in an unanticipated reconciliation. Its spokesmen
pointed out, it is true, the peril to the sou! involved in a
single-minded concentration on economic interests. The en-
emy, however, was not riches, but the bad habits sometimes
associated with them, and its warnings against an excessive
preoccupation with the pursuit of gain wore more and more
the air of after-thoughts, appended to teaching the main
tendency and emphasis of which were little affected by these
incidental qualifications. It insisted, in short, that money-
making, if not free from spiritual dangers, was not a danger
and nothing else, but that it could be, and ought to be,
carried on for the greater glory of God

The conception to which it appealed to bridge the gulf
sprang from the very heart of Puritan theology. It was that
expressed in the characteristic and oft-used phrase, "a Call-
ing." 74 The rational order of the universe is the work of God,
and its plan requires that the individual should labor for
God's glory. There is a spiritual calling, and a temporal
calling. It is the first duty of the Christian to know and be-
lieve in God; it is by faith that he will be saved. But faith
is not a mere profession, such as that of Talkative of Prat-
ing Row, whose "religion is to make a noise/7 The only gen-
uine faith is the faith which produces works. "At the day of
Doom men shall be judged according to their fruits. It will
not be said then, Did you believe? but, Were you doers or
talkers only?" 7r> The second duty of the Christian is to labor

200 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT

in the affairs of practical life, and this second duty is subor*
dinate only to the first. "God," wrote a Puritan divine, "doth
call every man and woman ... to serve him in some peculiar
employment in this world, both for their own and the com-
mon good. . . . The Great Governour of the world hath ap-
pointed to every man his proper post and province, and let
him be never so active out of his sphere, he will be at a great
loss, if he do not keep his own vineyard and mind his own
business."76

From this reiterated insistence on secular obligations as
imposed by the divine will, it follows that, not withdrawal
from the world, but the conscientious discharge of the du-
ties of business, is among the loftiest of religious and moral
virtues. "The begging friars and such monks as live only
to themselves and to their formal devotion, but do employ
themselves in no one thing to further their own subsistence
or the good of mankind . . . yet have the confidence to
boast of this their course as a state of perfection; which in
very deed, as to the worthiness of it, falls short of the poor-
est cobbler, for his is a calling of God, and theirs is none."77
The idea was not a new one. Luther had advanced it as a
weapon against monasticism. But for Luther, with his pa-
triarchal outlook on economic affairs, the calling means nor-
mally that slate of life in which the individual has been set
by Heaven, and against which it is impiety to rebel. On the
lips of Puritan divines, it is not an invitation to resignation,
but the bugle-call which summons the elect to the long battle
which will end only with their death. "The world is all be-
fore them." They are to hammer out their salvation, not
merely m vo cat tone, but per vocationcm. The calling is not
a condition in which the individual is born, but a strenuous
and exacting enterprise, to be undertaken, indeed, under the
guidance of Providence, but to be chosen by each man for
himself, with a deep sense of his solemn responsibilities
"God hath given to man reason for this use, that he should
first consider, then choose, then put in execution; and it is
a preposterous and brutish thing to fix or fall upon any
weighty business, such as a calling or condition of life, with-
out a careful pondering it in the balance of sound reason " 7S

Laborare cst orare. By the Puritan moralist the ancient
maxim is repeated with a new and intenser significance. The
labor which he idealizes is not simply a requirement imposed

TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES 201

by nature, or a punishment for the sin of Adam. It is itself a
kind of ascetic discipline, more rigorous than that demanded
of any order of mendicants — a discipline imposed by the
will of God, and to be undergone, not in solitude, but in the
punctual discharge of secular duties. It is not merely an eco-
nomic means, to be laid aside when physical needs have been
satisfied. Jt is a spiritual end, for in it alone can the soul
find health, and it must be continued as an ethical duty long
after it has ceased to be a material necessity. Work thus
conceived stands at the very opposite pole from "good
works," as they were understood, or misunderstood, by Prot-
estants. They, it was thought, had been a series of single
transactions, performed as compensation for particular sins,
or out of anxiety to acquire merit. What is required of the
Puritan is not individual meritorious acts, but a holy life — a
system in which every element is grouped round a central
idea, the service of God, from which all disturbing irrele-
vancies have been pruned, and to which all minor interests
are subordinated.

His conception of that life was expressed in the words
"Be wholly taken up in diligent business of your lawful call-
ings, when you are not exercised in the more immediate serv-
ice of God " ™ In order to deepen his spiritual life, the
Christian must be prepared to narrow it. He "is blind in no
man's cause, but best sighted in his own. He confines him-
self to the circle of his own affairs and thrusts not his fingers
in needless fires. . . He sees the falseness of it [the world]
and therefore learns to trust himself ever, otheis so far as
not to be damaged by their disappointment " s" There must
be no idle leisure: "those that are prodigal of their time de-
spise their own souls " M Religion must be active, not merely
contemplative. Contemplation is, indeed, a kind of self-
indulgence "To neglect this fi. e., bodily employment and
mental labor] and say, T will pray and meditate,' is as if
your servant should refuse your greatest work, and tye him-
self to some lesser, easie part. . . . God hath commanded you
some way or other to labour for your daily bread." *2 The
rich are no more excused from work than the poor, though
they may rightly use their riches to select some occupation
specially serviceable to others. Covetousness is a danger to
the soul, but it is not so grave a danger as sloth. "The stand-
ing pool is prone to putrefaction: and it were better to beat

202 iHE PURITAN MOVEMENT

down the body and to keep in subjection by a laborious call-
ing, than through luxury to become a cast-away " s] So far
from poverty being meritorious, it is a duty to choose the
more profitable occupation. "If God show you a way in
which you may lawfully get more than in another way (with-
out wrong to your soul or to any other), if you refuse this,
and choose the less gainful way, you cross one of the ends
of your Calling, and you refuse to be God's steward." Lux-
ury, unrestrained pleasure, personal extravagance, can have
no place in a Christian's conduct, for " every penny which is
laid out . . . must be done as by God's own appointment."
Even excessive devotion to friends and relations is to be
avoided. "It is an irrational act, and therefore not fit for a
rational creature, to love any one farther than reason will
allow us. ... It very often taketh up men's minds so as to
hinder their love to God"84 The Christian life, in sho»t,
must be systematic and organized, the work of an iron will
and a cool intelligence. Those who have read Mill's account
of his father must have been struck by the extent to which
Utilitarianism was not merely a political doctrine, but a
moral attitude. Some of the links in the Utilitarian coat of
mail were forged, it may be suggested, by the Puritan di-
vines of the seventeenth century.

The practical application of these generalities to business
is set out in the numerous works composed to expound the
rules of Christian conduct in the varied relations of life If
one may judge by their titles — Navigation Spintualizcd,
Husbandry Spiritualized, The Religious Weaver^ — there
must have been a considerable demand for books conducive
to professional edification. A characteristic specimen is The
Tradesman's Calling,^ by Richard Steele. The author, after
being deprived of a country living under the Act of Uniform-
ity, spent his declining years as a minister of a congregation
at Armourers Hall in London, and may be presumed to have
understood the spiritual requirements of the City in his day,
when the heroic age of Puritanism was almost over and en-
thusiasm was no longer a virtue. No one who was writing a
treatise on economic ethics today would address himself pri-
marily to the independent shopkeeper, as the figure most
representative of the business community, and Steele's book
throws a flood of light on the problems and outlook of the
bourgeoisie, in an age before the center of economic gravity

TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES 20J

had shifted from the substantial tradesman to the exporting
merchant, the industrial capitalist and the financier.

Like Baxter, he is acquainted with the teaching of earlier
authorities as to equity in bargaining. He is doubtful, how-
ever, of its practical utility. Obvious frauds in matters of
quality and weight are to be avoided; an honest tradesman
ought not to corner the market, or "accumulate two or three
callings merely to increase his riches," or oppress the poor;
nor should he seek more than "a reasonable proportion of
gain," or "lie on the catch to make Lhis] markets of others'
straits." But Steele rejects as useless in practice the various
objective standards of a reasonable profit — cost of produc-
tion, standard of life, customary prices — which had been
suggested in earlier ages, and concludes that the individual
must judge for himself u'Here, as in many other cases, an
upright conscience must be the clerk of the market."

In reality, however, the characteristic of The Tradesman's
Calling, as of the age in which it was written, is not the
relics of medieval doctrine which linger embalmed in its
guileless pages, but the robust common sense, which carries
the author lightly over traditional scruples on a tide of gen-
ial, if Philistine, optimism. For his main thesis is a com-
fortable one — that there is no necessary conflict between re-
ligion and business. "Prudence and Piety were always very
good friends. . . . You may gain enough of both worlds if
you would mind each in its place." His object is to show
how that agreeable result may be produced by dedicating
business — with due reservations — to the service of God, and
he has naturally little to say on the moral casuistry of eco-
nomic conduct, because he is permeated by the idea that
trade itself is a kind of religion. A tradesman's first duty is to
get a full insight into his calling, and to use his brains to
improve it. "He that hath lent you talents hath also said,
'Occupy till I come!' Your strength is a talent, your parts
are talents, and so is your time How is it that ye stand all
the day idle? . . . Your trade is your proper province. . . .
Your own vineyard you should keep. . . . Your fancies, your
understandings, your memories . . . are all to be laid out
therein." So far from their being an inevitable collision be-
tween the requirements of business and the claims of reli-
gion, they walk hand in hand. By a fortunate dispensation,
the virtues enjoined on Christians — diligence, moderation,

204 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT

sobriety, thrift — are the very qualities most conducive to
commercial success The foundation of all is prudence, and
prudence is merely another name for the "godly wisdom
[which] comes in and puts due bounds" to his expenses,
"and teaches the tradesman to live rather somewhat below
than at all above his income " Industry comes next, and in-
dustry is at once expedient and meritorious It will keep the
tradesman from kt frequent and needless frequenting of tav-
erns/' and pin him to his shop, "where you may most confi-
dently expect the presence and blessing of God "

If virtue is advantageous, vice is ruinous. Bad company,
speculation, gambling, politics, and "a preposterous zeal" in
religion — it is these things which are the ruin of tradesmen
Not, indeed, that religion is to be neglected. On the con-
trary, it "is to be exercised in the frequent use of holy ejac-
ulations." What is deprecated is merely the unbusinesslike
habit of "neglecting a man's necessary affairs upon pretence
of religious worship." But these faults, common and uncom-
mon alike, are precisely those to be avoided by the sincere
Christian, who must not, indeed, deceive or oppress his
neighbor, but need not fly to the other extreme, be righteous
overmuch, or refuse to "take the advantage which the Prov-
idence of God puts into his hands " By a kind of happy,
preestabhshed harmony, such as a later age discovered be-
tween the needs of society and the self-interest of the indi-
vidual, success in business is in itself almost a sign of spir-
itual grace, for it is proof that a man has labored faithfully
in his vocation, and that "God has blessed his trade " "Noth-
ing will pass in any man's account except it be done in the
way of his calling . . Next to the saving his soul, | the
tradesman's! care and business is to serve God in his calling,
and to drive it as far as it will go "

When duty was so profitable, might not profit-making be
a duty? Thus argued the honest pupils of Mr. Gnpeman,
the schoolmaster of Love-gam, a market-town in the county
of Coveting in the north 8T The inference was illogical, but
how attractive! WThen the Rev David Jones was so indis-
creet as to preach at St Mary Woolnoth in Lombard Street
a sermon against usury on the text "The Pharisees who
were covetous heard all these things and they derided
Christ," his career in London was brought to an abrupt
conclusion.88

TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES 205

The springs of economic conduct He in regions rarely pene-
trated by moralists, and to suggest a direct reaction of theory
on practice would be paradoxical. But, if the circumstances
which determine that certain kinds of conduct shall be profit-
able are economic, those which decide that they shall be the
object of general approval are primarily moral and intel-
lectual For conventions to be adopted with wholehearted
enthusiasm, to be not merely tolerated, but applauded, to
become the habit of a nation and the admiration of its phi-
losophers, the second condition must be present as well as
the first The insistence among men of pecuniary motives,
the strength of economic egotism, the appetite for gain —
these are the commonplaces of every age and need no em-
phasis What is significant is the change of standards which
converted a natural frailty into a resounding virtue After
all, it appears, a man can serve two masters, for — so hap-
pily is the world disposed — he may be paid by one, while
he works for the other Between the old-fashioned denun-
ciation of uncharitable covetousness and the new-fashioned
applause of economic enterprise, a bridge is thrown by the
argument which urges that enterprise itself is the discharge
of a duty imposed by God.

In the year 16QO appeared a pamphlet entitled A Discourse
of Trade', by N B , M D 80 Notable for its enlightened dis-
cussion of conventional theories of the balance of trade, it
is a good specimen of an indifferent gcwu^ But its author-
ship was more significant than its argument For N. B. was
Dr Nicholas Barbon; and Dr Nicholas Barbon, currency
expert, pioneer of insurance, and enthusiast for land-banks,
was the son of that Praise-God Barebones, by the parody of
whose alluring surname a cynical posterity recorded its ver-
dict on the brief comedy of the Rule of the Saints over
Laodicean Englishmen. The reaction from Puritan rigor to
Restoration license is the most familiar of platitudes. The
reaction to a mundane materialism was more gradual, more
general, and ultimately of greater significance The profli-
gacy of the courtier had its decorous counterpart in the
economic orgies of the tradesman and the merchant. Vo-
taries, not of Bacchus, but of a more exacting and more
profitable divinity, they celebrated their relief at the dis-
credit of a too arduous idealism, by plunging with redoubled
zest into the agreeable fever of making and losing money.

206 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT

The transition from the anabaptist to the company pro-
moter was less abrupt than might at first sight be supposed.
It had been prepared, however uninteiitior-'Jly, by Puritan
moralists. In their emphasis on the moral duty of untiring
activity, on work as an end in itself, on the evils of luxury
and extravagance, on foresight and thrift, on moderation and
self-discipline and rational calculation, they had created an
ideal of Christian conduct, which canonized as an ethical
principle the efficiency which economic theorists were preach-
ing as a specific for social disorders. It was as captivating as
it was novel. To countless generations of religious thinkers,
the fundamental maxim of Christian social ethics had seemed
to be expressed in the words of St. Paul to Timothy: " Hav-
ing food and raiment, let us be therewith content. For the
love of money is the root of all evil." Now, while as always,
the world battered at the gate, a new standard was raised
within the citadel by its own defenders. The garrison had
discovered that the invading host of economic appetites wab,
not an enemy, but an ally. Not sufficiency to the needs of
daily life, but limitless increase and expansion, became the
goal of the Christian's efforts. Not consumption, on which
the eyes of earlier sages had been turned, but production,
became the pivot of his argument. Not an easy-going and
open-handed charity, but a systematic and methodical ac-
cumulation, won the meed of praise that belongs to the good
and faithful servant. The shrewd, calculating commercial-
ism which tries all human relations by pecuniary standards,
the acquisitiveness which cannot rest while there are com-
petitors to be conquered or profits to be won, the love of
social power and hunger for economic gain — these irrepres-
sible appetites had evoked from time immemorial the warn-
ings and denunciations of saints and sages. Plunged in the
cleansing waters of later Puritanism, the qualities which less
enlightened ages had denounced as social vices emerged as
economic virtues. They emerged as moral virtues as well.
For the world exists not to be enjoyed, but to be conquered.
Only its conqueror deserves the name of Christian. For such
a philosophy, the question "What shall it pront a man?"
carries no sting. In winning the world, he wins the salvation
of his own soul as well.

The idea of economic progress as an end to be consciously
sought, while ever receding, had been unfamiliar to most

TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES 207

earlier generations of Englishmen, in which the theme of
moralists had been the danger of unbridled cupidity, and
the main aim of public policy had been the stability of tra-
tional relationships. It found a new sanction in the identifi-
cation of labor and enterprise with the service of God. The
magnificent energy which changed in a century the face of
material civilization was to draw nourishment from that
temper The worship of production and ever greater produc-
tion— the slavish drudgery of the millionaire and his un-
happy servants — was to be hallowed by the precepts of the
same compelling creed

Social development moves with a logic whose inferences
are long delayed, and the day of these remoter applications
had not yet dawned The version of Christian ethics ex-
pounded by Puritanism in some of its later phases was still
only in its vigorous youth But it sailed forward on a flow-
ing tide It had an unconscious ally in the pre-occupatkm
with economic interests which found expression in the en-
thusiasm of business politicians for a commercial Macht-
pohtik The youthful Commonwealth, a rival of Holland
ufor the fairest mistress in the world — trade," MU was not two
years old when it made its own essay in economic imperial-
ism "A bare-faced war" for commerce, got up by the Royal
African Company was Clarendon's verdict"1 on the Dutch
war of 1665-7 Five years later, Shaftesbury hounded the
City against Holland with the cry of Dclcnda est Carthago.
The war finance of the Protectorate had made it necessary
for Cromwell to court Dutch and Jewish, as well as native,
capitalists, and the impecunious Government of the Resto-
ration was in the hands of those syndicates of goldsmiths
whose rapacity the Chancellor, a survivor from the age be-
fore the deluge, when aristocrats still despised the upstart
plutocracy, found not a little disgusting <)2

The contemporary progress of economic thought fortified
no less the mood which glorified the economic virtues. Eco-
nomic science developed in England, not, as in Germany, as
the handmaid of public administration, nor, as in France,
through the speculations of philosophers and men of letters,
but as the interpreter of the practical interests of the City.
With the exception of Petty and Locke, its most eminent
practitioners were business men, and the questions which
excited them were those, neither of production nor of social

208 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT

organization, but of commerce and finance — the balance of
trade, tariffs, interest, currency and credit. The rise of Po-
litical Arithmetic after the Restoration, profoundly influ-
enced, as it was, by the Cartesian philosophy and by the
progress of natural science, stamped their spontaneous and
doctrineless individualism with the seal of theoretical or-
thodoxy. Knowledge, wrote the author of the preface to a
work by one of the most eminent exponents of the new sci-
ence, uin great measure is become mechanical." <J> The exact
analysis of natural conditions, the calculations of forces and
strains, the reduction of the complex to the operation of sim-
ple, constant and measurable forces, was the natural bias
of an age interested primarily in mathematics and physics.
Its object was "to express itself in terms of number, weight
or measure, to use only arguments of sense, and to consider
only such causes as have visible foundations in nature,
leaving those that depend upon the mutable minds, opinions,
appetites and passions of particular men to the considera-
tion of others " l(1

In such an atmosphere, the moral casuistry, which had oc-
cupied so large a place in the earlier treatment of social and
economic subjects, seemed the voice of an antiquated super-
stition. Moreover, the main economic dogma of the mercan-
tilist had an affinity with the main ethical dogma of the
Puritan, which was the more striking because the coincidence
was undesigned. To the former, production, not consump-
tion, was the pivot of the economic system, and, by what
seems to the modern reader a curious perversion, consump-
tion is applauded only because it offers a new market lor
productive energies. To the latter, the cardinal virtues are
precisely those which find in the strenuous toils of industry
and commerce their most natural expression. The typical
qualities of the successful business life, in the days before
the rise of joint-stock enterprise, were intensity and earnest-
ness of labor, concentration, system and method, the initia-
tive which broke with routine and the foresight which post-
poned the present to the future. Advice like that of the Rev-
erend Mr. Steele to his City congregation was admirably
calculated to give these arduous excellences a heightened
status and justification. The lean goddess, Abstinence, whom
Mr. Keynes, in a passage of brilliant indiscretion, has re-
vealed as the tutelary divinity of Victorian England, was in-

TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES 209

ducted to the austere splendors of her ascetic shrine by the
pious hands of Puritan moralists.

Such teaching fell upon willing ears. Excluded by legis-
lation from a direct participation in public affairs, Dissent-
ers of means and social position threw themselves into the
alternative career offered by commerce and finance, and did
so the more readily because religion itself had blessed their
choice If they conformed the character given them by their
critics — "opinionating, relying much upon their own judg-
ment . . ungrateful, as not holding themselves beholden to
any man . . . proud, as thinking themselves the only favor-
ites of God, and the only wise or virtuous among men' 'n —
disposed them to the left in questions of Church and State.
The names of the commercial magnates of the day lend some
confirmation to the suggestion of that affinity between reli-
gious radicalism and business acumen which envious con-
temporaries expressed in their sneers at the "Presbyterian
old usurer/1 4ldevout misers,'1 and ^extorting Ishban " '"' The
four London members elected in 1661 had not only filled the
ordinary civic offices, but had held between them the gov-
ernorship of the East India Company, the deputy-governor-
ship of the Levant Company, and the masterships of the
Salters and Drapers Companies, two of them were said to be
Presbyterians, and two Independents <l7 Of the committee of
leading business men who advised Charles II \s Government
on questions of commercial policy, some, like Sir Patience
Ward and Michael Godfrey, represented the ultra-Prot-
estantism of the Citv, while others, like Thomas Papillon
and the two Houblons, were members of the French Hugue-
not church in London <KS In spite of the bitter commercial
rivalry with Holland, both Dutch capital and Dutch ideas
found an enthusiastic welcome in London."" Sir George
Downing Charles II 's envoy at the Hague, who endeavored
to acclimatize Dutch banking methods in England, and who,
according to Clarendon, was one of the intriguers who pre-
pared the war of 1665-7, had been reared in the Puritan
severity of Salem and Harvard, and had been a preacher in
the regiment of Colonel Okev ' ' Pateison, who supplied the
idea of a joint-stock banking corporation, which Michael
Godfrey popularized in the City and Montagu piloted
through Parliament, was, like the magnificent Law, a Scotch
company promoter, who had haunted the Hague in the days

210 1HE PURITAN MOVEMENT

when it was the home of disconsolate Whigs.102 Yarranton,
most ingenious of projectors, had been an officer in the Par-
liamentary army, and his book was a long sermon on the
virtues of the Dutch. 1(- Defoe, who wiote the idyll of tnc
bourgeoisie in his Complete English Tradesman, was born oi
nonconformist parents, and was intended for the ministry be-
fore, having failed in trade, he took up politics and litera-
ture.1'^ In his admirable study of the iron industry, Mr.
Ashton has shown that the most eminent iron-masters of the
eighteenth century belonged as a rule to the Puritan connec-
tion.304 They had their prototype in the seventeenth century
in Baxter's friend, Thomas Foley, "who from almost nothing
did get about £57000 per annum or more by iron works '' ""
To such a generation, a creed which transformed the ac-
quisition of wealth from a drudgery or a temptation into a
moral duty was the milk of lions. It was not that religion
was expelled from practical life, but that religion itself gave
it a foundation of granite. In that keen atmosphere of eco-
nomic enterprise, the ethics of the Puritan bore some resem-
blance to those associated later with the name of Smiles The
good Christian was not wholly dissimilar from the economic
man.

IV THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY

To applaud certain qualities is by implication to condemn
the habits and institutions which appear to conflict with
them. The recognition accorded by Puritan ethics to the
economic virtues, in an age when such virtues were rarer
than they are today, gave a timely stimulus to economic
efficiency. But it naturally, if unintentionally, modified the
traditional attitude towards social obligations. For the spon-
taneous, doctrineless individualism, which became the rule
of English public life a century before the philosophy of it
was propounded by Adam Smith, no single cause was re-
sponsible. But, simultaneously with the obvious movements
in the world of affairs — the discrediting of the ideal of a
paternal, authoritarian Government, the breakdown of cen-
tral control over local administration, the dislocation caused
by the Civil War, the expansion of trade and the shifting
of industry from its accustomed seats — it is perhaps not
fanciful to detect in the ethics of Puritanism one force con-

THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY 211

Lributing to the change in social policy which is noticeable ,
after the middle of the century.

The loftiest teaching cannot escape from its own shadow.
To urge that the Christian life must be lived in a zealous
discharge of private duties — how necessary! Yet how readily
perverted to the suggestion that there are no vital social ob-
ligations beyond and above them' To insist that the indi-
vidual is responsible, that no man can save his brother, that
the essence of religion is the contact of the soul with its
Maker, how true and indispensable! But how easy to slip
from that truth into the suggestion that society is without
responsibility, that no man can help his brother, that the so-
cial order and its consequences are not even the scaffolding
by which men may climb to greater heights, but something
external, alien and irrelevant — something, at best, indiffer-
ent to the life of the spirit, and, at worst, the sphere of the
letter which killeth and of the reliance on works which en-
snares the soul into the slumber of death! In emphasizing
that God's Kingdom is not of this world, Puritanism did not
always escape the suggestion that this world is no part of
God's Kingdom. The complacent victim of that false antith-
esis between the social mechanism and the life of the spirit,
which was to tyrannize over English religious thought for
the next two centuries, it enthroned religion in the privacy
of the individual soul, not without some sighs of sober satis-
faction at its abdication from society. Professor Dicey has
commented on the manner in which uthe appeal of the Evan-
gelicals to personal religion corresponds with the appeal of
Benthamite Liberals to individual energy " HU> The same af-
finity between religious and social interests found an even
clearer expression in the Puritan movement of the seven-
teenth century. Individualism in religion led insensibly, if
not quite logically, to an individualist morality, and an in-
dividualist morality to a disparagement of the significance
of the social fabric as compared with personal character.

A practical example of that change of emphasis is given by
the treatment accorded to the questions of Enclosure and of
Pauperism. For a century and a half the progress of enclos-
ing had been a burning issue, flaring up, from time to time,
into acute agitation. During the greater part of that period,
from Latimer in the thirties of the sixteenth century to Laud
in the thirties of the seventeenth, the attitude of religious

212 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT

teachers had been one of condemnation. Sermon after ser-
mon and pamphlet after pamphlet — not to mention Statutes
and Royal Commissions — had been launched against depop-
ulation. The appeal had been, not merely to public policy,
but to religion. Peasant and lord, in their different degrees,
are members of one Christian commonwealth, within which
the law of charity must bridle the corroding appetite for
economic gain. In such a mystical corporation, knit together
by mutual obligations, no man may press his advantage
to the full, for no man may seek to live " outside the body
of the Church."

.Sabotaged by the unpaid magistracy of country gentle-
men, who had been the obstructive agents of local adminis-
tration, the practical application of such doctrines had al-
ways been intermittent, and, when the Long Parliament
struck the weapon of administrative law from the hands of
the Crown, it had ceased altogether. But the politics of West-
minster were not those of village and borough The events
which seemed to aristocratic Parliamentarians to close the
revolution seemed to the left wing of the victorious army
only to begin it In that earliest and most turbulent of Eng-
lish democracies, where buff -coat taught scripture politics to
his general, the talk was not merely of political, but of social,
reconstruction The program of the Levellers, who more
than any other party could claim to express the aspirations
of the unprivileged classes, included a demand, not only for
annual or biennial Parliaments, manhood suffrage, a redistri-
bution of seats in proportion to population, and the abolition
of the veto of the House of Lords, but also that "you would
have laid open all enclosures of fens and other commons, or
have them enclosed only or chiefly for the benefit of the
poor " 1(/T Theoretical communism, repudiated b> the leading
Levellers, found its expression in the agitation of the Dig-
gers, on whose behalf Winstanley argued that, "seeing the
common people of England, by joynt consent of person and
purse, have caste out Charles, our Norman oppressour
the land now is to returne into the joynt hands of those who
have conquered, that is the commonours," and that the vic-
tory over the King was incomplete, as long as "wee . . . re-
mayne slaves still to the kingly power in the hands of lords
of manors."108

Nor was it only from the visionary and the zealot that the

THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY 2 IS

pressure for redress proceeded. When the shattering of tra-
ditional authority seemed for a moment to make all things
new, local grievances, buried beneath centuries of dull op*
pression, started to life, and in several Midland counties the
peasants rose to pull down the hated hedges At Leicester,
where in 1 649 there were rumors of a popular movement to
throw down the enclosures of the neighboring forest, the
City Council took the matter up. A petition was drafted,
setting out the economic and social evils attending enclosure,
and proposing the establishment of machinery to check it,
consisting of a committee without whose assent enclosing
was not to be permitted. A local minister was instructed to
submit the petition to Parliament, "which hath still a watch-
ful eye and open ear to redress the common grievances of
the nation." 309 The agent selected to present the city's case
was the Rev. John Moore, a prolific pamphleteer, who for
several years attacked the depopulating landlord with all
the fervor of Latimer, though with even less than Latimer's
success

Half a century before, such commotions would have been
followed by the passing of Depopulation Acts and the issue
of a Royal Commission. But, in the ten years since the meet-
ing of the Long Parliament, the whole attitude of public
policy towards the movement had begun to change. Con-
fiscations, compositions and war taxation had effected a rev-
olution in the distribution of property, similar, on a smaller
scale, to that which had taken place at the Reformation. As
land changed hands, customary relations were shaken and
new interests were created. Enclosure, as Moore com-
plained,11" was being pushed forward by means of law suits
ending in Chancery decrees. It was not to be expected that
City merchants and members of the Committee for Com-
pounding, some of whom had found land speculation a prof-
itable business, should hear with enthusiasm a proposal to
revive the old policy of arresting enclosures by State inter-
ference, at which the gentry had grumbled for more than
a century.

In these circumstances, it is not surprising that reformers
should have found the open ear of Parliament impenetrably
closed to agrarian grievances. Nor was it only the political
and economic environment which had changed. The revolu-
tion in thought was equally profound. The theoretical basis

214 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT

of the policy of protecting the peasant by preventing en-
closure had been a conception of landownership which re-
garded its rights and its duties as inextricably interwoven.
Property was not merely a source of income, but a public
function, and its use was limited by social obligations and
necessities of State. With such a doctrine the classes who had
taken the lead in the struggle against the monarchy could
make no truce. Its last vestiges finally disappeared when
the Restoration Parliament swept away military tenures, and
imposed on the nation, in the shape of an excise, the finan-
cial burden previously borne by themselves.

The theory which took its place, and which was to become
in the eighteenth century almost a religion, was that ex-
pressed by Locke, when he described property as a right an-
terior to the existence of the State, and argued that uthe
supreme power cannot take from any man any part of his
property without his own consent " But Locke merely poured
into a philosophical mould ideas which had been hammered
out in the stress of political struggles, and which were al-
ready the commonplace of landowner and merchant The
view of society held by that part of the Puritan movement
which was socially and politically influential had been ex-
pressed by Ireton and Cromwell in their retort to the demo-
crats in the army. It was that only the freeholders constitut-
ed the body politic, and that they could use their property
as they pleased, uncontrolled by obligations to any superior,
or by the need of consulting the mass of men, who were mere
tenants at will, with no fixed interest or share in the land of
the kingdom nl Naturally, this change of ideas had profound
reactions on agrarian policy. Formerly a course commending
itself to all public-spirited persons, the prevention of en-
closure was now discredited as the program of a sect of re-
ligious and political radicals. When Major-General Whalley
in 1656 introduced a measure to regulate and restrict the
enclosure of commons, framed, apparently, on the lines pro-
posed by the authorities of Leicester, there was an instant
outcry from members that it would "destroy property," and
the bill was refused a second reading 11J Alter hie Restora-
tion the tide began to run more strongly in the same direc-
tion. Enclosure had already become the hobby of the coun-
try gentleman. Experts advocated it on economic grounds,
and legislation to facilitate it was introduced into Parlia-

THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY 21$

merit. Though its technique still remained to be elaborated,
the attitude which was to be decisive in the eighteenth cen-
tury had already been crystallized.

The change of policy was striking. The reason of it was
not merely that political conditions made the landed gentry
omnipotent, and that the Royalist squirearchy, who streamed
back to their plundered manors in 1660, were in no mood to
countenance a revival, by the Government of Charles II, of
the administrative interference with the rights of property
which had infuriated them in the Government of Charles I.
It was that opinion as to social policy had changed, and
changed not least among men of religion themselves. The
pursuit of economic self-interest, which is the law of nature,
is already coming to be identified by the pious with the op-
eration of the providential plan, which is the law of God.
Enclosures will increase the output of wool and grain. Each
man knows best what his land is suited to produce, and the
general interest will be best served by leaving him free to
produce it. "It is an undeniable maxim that every one by the
light of nature and reason will do that which makes for his
greatest advantage. . . . The advancement of private persons
will be the advantage of the public

It is significant that such considerations were adduced,
not by an economist, but by a minister. For the argument
wdb ethical as well as economic, and, when Moore appealed
to the precepts of traditional morality to bridle pecuniary
interests, he provoked the retort that a judicious attention
to pecuniary interests was an essential part of an enlightened
morality. What the poor need for their spiritual health is —
to use the favorite catchword of the age — "regulation," and
regulation is possible only if they work under the eye of an
employer. In the eyes of the austere moralists of the Resto-
ration, the first, and most neglected, virtue of the poor is
industry. Common rights encourage idleness by offering a
precarious and demoralizing livelihood to men who ought
to be at work for a master. It is not surprising, therefore,
that the admonitions of religious teachers against the wick-
edness of joining house to house and field to field should
almost entirely cease. Long the typical example of unchar-
itable covetousness, enclosure is now considered, not merely
economically expedient, but morally beneficial. Baxter, with
all his scrupulousness — partly, perhaps, because of his scru-

216 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT

pulousness — differs from most earlier divines in giving a
qualified approval to enclosure "done in moderation by a
pious man/' for the characteristic reason that a master can
establish a moral discipline among his employees, which
they would miss if they worked for themselves. What mat-
ters, in short, is not their circumstances, but their charac-
ter. If they lose as peasants, they will gain as Christians.
Opportunities for spiritual edification are more important
than the mere material environment. If only the material
environment were not itself among the forces determining
men's capacity to be edified!

The temper which deplored that the open-field village was
not a school of the severer virtues turned on pauperism and
poor relief an even more shattering criticism There is no
province of social life in which the fashioning of a new scale
of ethical values on the Puritan anvil is more clearly re-
vealed. In the little communities of peasants and crafts-
men which composed medieval England, all, when Heaven
sent a bad harvest, had starved together, and the misery of
the sick, the orphan and the aged had appeared as a per-
sonal calamity, not as a social problem. Apart from a few
precocious theorists, who hinted at the need for a universal
and secular system of provision for distress, the teaching
most characteristic of medieval writers had been that the
relief of the needy was a primary obligation on those who
had means. St. Thomas, who in this matter is typical, quotes
with approval the strong words of St Ambrose about those
who cling to the bread of the starving, insists on the idea
that property is stewardship, and concludes —a conclusion
not always drawn from that well-worn phrase — that to with-
hold alms when there is evident and urgent necessity is
mortal sin111 Popular feeling had lent a half-mystical
glamour both to poverty and to the compassion by which
poverty was relieved, for poor men were God's friends. At
best, the poor were thought to represent our Lord in a pe-
culiarly intimate way — ain that sect," as Langland said,
"our Saviour saved all mankind" — and it was necessary for
the author of a religious manual to explain that the rich, as
such, were not necessarily hateful to God n ' At worst, men
reflected that the prayers of the poor availed much, and
that the sinner had been saved from hell by throwing a loaf
of bread to a beggar, even though a curse went with it. The

THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY 217

alms bestowed today would be repaid a thousandfold, when
the soul took its dreadful journey amid rending briars and
scorching flames.

If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon,

Evcne mghte and alle,
Sit thee down and put them on,

And Chnste receive thy saule.

If hosen and shoon thou gavest nane,

Evene mghte and alle,
The whinnes shall pncke thee to the bare bane,

And Chnstc receive thy saule.

If ever thou gavest meate or dnnke,

Evene mghte and alle,
The fire shall never make thee shrmke,

And Chn\te receive thy saule.

If meate or dnnke thou gavest nanc,

Evene mghte and alle,
The fire will burne thee to the bare bane,

And Chn\te receive thy saule

This ae niphte, this ae mghte,

Evene mghte and alle,
Fire, and sleete, and candle-hghte,

And Chn^te receive thy saule ll{>

The social character of wealth, which had been the essence
of the medieval doctrine, was asserted by English divines in
the sixteenth century with redoubled emphasis, precisely
because the growing individualism of the age menaced the
traditional conception. "The poor man," preached Latimer,
"hath title to the rich man's goods; so that the rich man
ought to let the poor man have part of his riches to help and
to comfort him withal " 11T Nor had that sovereign indiffer-
ence to the rigors of the economic calculus disappeared,
when, under the influence partly of humanitarian represen-
tatives of the Renaissance like Vives, partly of religious
reformers, partly of their own ambition to gather all the
threads of social administration into their own hands, the
statesmen of the sixteenth century set themselves to organ-
ize a secular system of poor relief. In England, after three
generations in which the attempt was made to stamp out
vagrancy by police measures of hideous brutality, the mo-

218 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT

mentous admission was made that its cause was economic
distress, not merely personal idleness, and that the whip had
no terrors for the man who must either tramp or starve.
The result was the celebrated Acts imposing a compulsory
poor-rate and requiring the able-bodied man to be set on
work. The Privy Council, alert to prevent disorder, drove
lethargic justices hard, and down to the Civil War the sys-
tem was administered with fair regularity. But the Eliza-
bethan Poor Law was never designed to be what, with dis-
astrous results, it became in the eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries, the sole measure for coping with economic
distress. While it provided relief, it was but the last link in
a chain of measures — the prevention of evictions, the control
of food supplies and prices, the attempt to stabilize employ-
ment and to check unnecessary dismissals of workmen —
intended to mitigate the forces which made relief necessary
Apart from the Poor Law, the first forty years of the sev-
enteenth century were prolific in the private chantv which
founded alms-houses and hospitals, and established funds to
provide employment or to aid struggling tradesmen. The
appeal was still to religion, which owed to poverty a kind
of reverence.

It was Thy choice, whilst Thou on earth didst stay,
And hadst not whereupon Thy head to lay 11K

"What, speak you of such things?" said Nicholas Ferrar
on his death-bed to one who commended his charities. "It
would have been but a suitable return for me to have given
all I had, and not to have scattered a few crumbs of alms
here and there/'11''

It was inevitable that, in the anarchy of the Civil War,
both private charity and public relief should fall on evil
days. In London, charitable endowments seem to have suf-
fered from more than ordinary malversation, and there were
complaints that the income both of Bridewell and of the
Hospitals was seriously reduced.120 In the country, the rec-
ords of Quarter Sessions paint a picture of confusion, in
which the machinery of presentment by constables to jus-
tice has broken down, and a long wail arises, that thieves
are multiplied, the poor are neglected, and vagrants wander
to and fro at their will.121 The administrative collapse of the

THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY 219

Elizabethan Poor Law continued after the Restoration, and
twenty-three years later Sir Matthew Hale complained that
the sections in it relating to the provision of employment
were a dead letter.122 Always unpopular with the local au-
thorities, whom they involved in considerable trouble and
expense, it is not surprising that, with the cessation of pres-
sure by the Central Government, they should, except here
and there, have been neglectd. What is more significant,
however, than the practical deficiencies in the administra-
tion of relief, was the rise of a new school of opinion, which
regarded with repugnance the whole body of social theory
of which both private charity and public relief had been the
expression.

"The generall rule of all England," wrote a pamphleteer
in 1646, uis to whip and punish the wandring beggars . . .
and so many justices execute one branch of that good Stat-
ute (which is the point of justice), but as for the point of
charitie, they leave \\t] undone, which is to provide houses
and convenient places to set the poore to work." 123 The
House of Commons appears to have been conscious that the
complaint had some foundation; in 1649 it ordered that the
county justices should be required to see that stocks of ma-
terial were provided as the law required,124 and the question
of preparing new legislation to ensure that persons in dis-
tress should be found employment was on several occasions
referred to committees of the House.125 Nothing seems,
however, to have come of these proposals, nor was the
Elizabethan policy of "setting the poor on work" that which
was most congenial to the temper of the time. Upon the
admission that distress was the result, not of personal defi-
ciencies, but of economic causes, with its corollary that its
victims had a legal right to be maintained by society, the
growing individualism of the age turned the same frigid
scepticism as was later directed against the Speenhamland
policy by the reformers of 1834. Like the friends of Job, it
saw in misfortune, not the chastisement of love, but the
punishment for sin. The result was that, while the penalties
on the vagrant were redoubled, religious opinion laid less
emphasis on the obligation of charity than upon the duty
of work, and that the admonitions which had formerly been
turned upon uncharitable covetousness were now directed
against improvidence and idleness. The characteristic senti-

220 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT

ment was that of Milton's friend, Hartlib: "The law of God
saith, 'he that will not work, let him not eat.' This would
be a sore scourge and smart whip for idle persons if ...
none should be suffered to eat till they had wrought for

j£ » 126

The new attitude found expression in the rare bursts of
public activity provoked by the growth of pauperism be-
tween 1640 and 1660. The idea of dealing with it on sound
business principles, by means of a corporation which would
combine profit with philanthropy, was being sedulously
preached by a small group of reformers.127 Parliament took
it up, and in 1649 passed an Act for the relief and employ-
ment of the poor and the punishment of beggars, under
which a company was to be established with power to ap-
prehend vagrants, to offer them the choice between work and
whipping, and to set to compulsory labor all other poor per-
sons, including children without means of maintenance.128
Eight years later the prevalence of vagrancy produced an
Act of such extreme severity as almost to recall the sugges-
tion made a generation later by Fletcher of Saltoun, that
vagrants should be sent to the galleys. It provided that, since
offenders could rarely be taken in the act, any vagrant who
failed to satisfy the justices that he had a good reason for
being on the roads should be arrested and punished as a
sturdy beggar, whether actually begging or not.129

The protest against indiscriminate almsgiving, as the
parade of a spurious religion, which sacrified character to a
formal piety, was older than the Reformation, but it had
been given a new emphasis by the reformers. Luther had
denounced the demands of beggars as blackmail, and the
Swiss reformers had stamped out the remnants of monastic
charity, as a bribe ministered by Popery to dissoluteness
and demoralization. "I conclude that all the large givings of
the papists," preached an English divine in the reign of
Elizabeth, "of which at this day many make so great brags,
because they be not done in a reverent regard of the com-
mandment of the Lord, in love, and of an inward being
touched with the calamities of the needy, but for to be well
reported of before men whilst they are alive, and to be
prayed for after they are dead ... are indeed no alms, but
Pharisaical trumpets." 1:>J° The rise of a commercial civiliza-
tion, the reaction against the authoritarian social policy of

THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY 221

the Tudors, and the progress of Puritanism among the mid-
dle classes, all combined in the next half-century to sharpen
the edge of that doctrine. Nurtured in a tradition which
made the discipline of character by industry and self-denial
the center of its ethical scheme, the Puritan moralist was
undisturbed by any doubts as to whether even the seed of
the righteous might not sometimes be constrained to beg its
bread, and met the taunt that the reputation of good works
was the cloak for a conscienceless egoism with the retort
that the easy-going open-handedness of the sentimentalist
was not less selfish in its motives and was more corrupting
to its objects liAs for idle beggars," wrote Steele, "happy
for them if fewer people spent their foolish pity upon their
bodies, and if more shewed some wise compassion upon their
souls " 1 n That the greatest of evils is idleness, that the
poor are the victims, not of circumstances, but of their own
"idle, irregular and wicked courses,11 that the truest charity
is not to enervate them by relief, but so to reform their
characters that relief may be unnecessary — such doctrines
turned severity from a sin into a duty, and froze the im-
pulse of natural pity with the assurance that, if indulged,
it would perpetuate the suffering which it sought to allay.

Few tricks of the unsophisticated intellect are more curi-
ous that the naive psychology of the business man, who
ascribes his achievements to his own unaided efforts, in
bland unconsciousness of a social order without whose con-
tinuous support and vigilant protection he would be as a
lamb bleating in the desert That individualist complex owes
part of its self-assurance to the suggestion of Puritan mor-
alists, that practical success is at once the sign and the
reward of ethical superiority "No question," argued a Puri-
tan pamphleteer, k'but it 1 riches 1 should be the portion
rather of the godly than of the wicked, were it good for
them, for godliness hath the promises of this life as well
as of the life to come " ' ~ The demonstration that distress
is a proof of demerit, though a singular commentary on the
lives of Christian saints and sages, has always been popular
with the prosperous By the lusty plutocracy of the Restora-
tion, roaring after its meat, and not indisposed, if it could
not find it elsewhere, to seek it from God, it was welcomed
with a shout of applause.

A society which reverences the attainment of riches as

222 THL PURITAN MOVEMENT

the supreme felicity will naturally be disposed to regard the
poor as damned in the next world, if only to justify itself
for making their life a hell in this. Advanced by men of
religion as a tonic for the soul, the doctrine of the danger
of pampering poverty was hailed by the rising school of
Political Arithmeticians as a sovereign cure for the ills of
society. For, if the theme of the moralist was that an easy-
going indulgence undermined character, the theme of the
economist was that it was economically disastrous and finan-
cially ruinous. The Poor Law is the mother of idleness,
"men and women growing so idle and proud that they will
not work, but lie upon the parish wherein they dwell for
maintenance." It discourages thrift; "if shame or fear of
punishment makes him earn his dayly bread, he will do no
more; his children are the charge of the parish and his old
age his recess from labour or care." It keeps up wages, since
"ft encourages wilful and evil-disposed persons to impose
what wages they please upon their labours ; and herein they
are so refractory to reason and the benefit of the nation
that, when corn and provisions are cheap, they will not
work for less wages than when they were dear " 5 ' To the
landowner who cursed the poor-rates, and the clothier who
grumbled at the high cost of labor, one school of religious
thought now brought the comforting assurance that moral-
ity itself would be favored by a reduction of both.

As the history of the Poor Law in the nineteenth century
was to prove, there is no touchstone, except the treatment
of childhood, which reveals the true character of a social
philosophy more clearly than the spirit in which it regards
the misfortunes of those of its members who fall by the
way. Such utterances on the subject of poverty were merely
one example of a general attitude, which appeared at times
to consign to collective perdition almost the whole of the
wage-earning population. It was partly that, in an age which
worshiped property as the foundation of the social order,
the mere laborer seemed something less than a full citizen.
It was partly the result of the greatly increased influence on
thought and public affairs acquired at the Restoration by
the commercial classes, whose temper was a ruthless ma-
terialism, determined at all costs to conquer world-markets
from France and Holland, and prepared to sacrifice every
other consideration to their economic ambitions. It was

THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY 223

partly that, in spite of a century of large-scale production
in textiles, the problems of capitalist industry and of a
propertyless proletariat were still too novel for their essen-
tial features to be appreciated. Even those writers, like
Baxter and Bunyan, who continued to insist on the wicked-
ness of extortionate prices and unconscionable interest,
rarely thought of applying their principles to the subject
of wages. Their social theory had been designed for an age
of petty agriculture and industry, in which personal rela-
tions had not yet been superseded by the cash nexus, and
the craftsman or peasant farmer was but little removed in
economic status from the half-dozen journeymen or laborers
whom he employed. In a world increasingly dominated by
great clothiers, iron-masters and mine-owners, they still ad-
hered to the antiquated categories of master and servant,
with the same obstinate indifference to economic realities as
leads the twentieth century to talk of employers and em-
ployed, long after the individual employer has been converted
into an impersonal corporation.

In a famous passage of the Communist Manifesto, Marx
observes that "the bourgeoisie, wherever it got the upper
hand, put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations,
pitilessly tore asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man
to his t natural superiors,' and left remaining no other bond
between man and man than naked self-interest and callous
cash payment." 134 An interesting illustration of his thesis
might be found in the discussions of the economics of em-
ployment by English writers of the period between 1660 and
1760. Their characteristic was an attitude towards the new
industrial proletariat noticeably harsher than that general in
the first half of the seventeenth century, and which has no
modern parallel except in the behavior of the less reputable
of white colonists towards colored labor. The denunciations
of the "luxury, pride and sloth" ir> of the English wage-
earners of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are, in-
deed, almost exactly identical with those directed against
African natives today. It is complained that, compared with
the Dutch, they are 'self-indulgent and idle; that they want
no more than a bare subsistence, and will cease work the
moment they obtain it; that, the higher their wages, the
more— uso licentious are they" l Ml— they spend upon drink;
that high prices, therefore, are not a misfortune, but a bless-

224 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT

ing; since they compel the wage-earner to be more industri-
ous; and that high wages are not a blessing, but a misfortune,
since they merely conduce to "weekly debauches "

When such doctrines were general, it was natural that the
rigors of economic exploitation should be preached as a pub-
lic duty, and. with a few exceptions, the writers of the
period differed only as to the methods by which severity
could most advantageously be organized Pollexfen and
Walter Harris thought that salvation might be found by
reducing the number of days kept as holidays Bishop Ber-
keley, with the conditions of Ireland before his eyes, sug-
gested that "sturdy beggars should . . be seized and made
slaves to the public for a certain term of years ' Thomas
Alcock, who was shocked at the workman's taste for snuff,
tea and ribbons, proposed the revival of sumptuary legis-
lation J )7 The writers who advanced schemes for reformed
workhouses, which should be places at once of punishment
and of training, were innumerable. All were agreed that, on
moral no less than on economic grounds, it was vital that
wages should be reduced The doctrine afterwards expressed
by Arthur Young, when he wrote, "every one but an idiot
knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they
will never be industrious/' * 'b was the tritest commonplace
of Restoration economists It was not argued, it was ac-
cepted as self-evident

When philanthropists were inquiring whether it might not
be desirable to reestablish slavery, it was not to be expected
that the sufferings of the destitute would wring their hearts
with social compunction The most curious feature in the
whole discussion, and that which is most sharply in contrast
with the long debate on pauperism carried on in the six-
teenth century, was the resolute refusal to admit that society
had any responsibility for the causes of distress Tudor
divines and statesmen had little mercy for idle rogues. But
the former always, and the latter ultimately, regarded pau-
perism primarily as a social phenomenon produced by
economic dislocation, and the embarrassing question put by
the genial Harrison — "at whose handes shall the bloude of
these men be required?" 1%H<> — was never far from the minds
even of the most cynical. Their successors after the Res-
toration were apparently quite unconscious that it was even
conceivable that there might be any other cause of poverty

THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY 225

than the moral failings of the poor. The practical conclusion
to be drawn from so comfortable a creed was at once ex-
tremely simple and extremely agreeable. It was not to find
employment under the Act of 1601, for to do that was only
"to render the poor more bold." It was to surround the
right to relief with obstacles such as those contained in the
Act of 1662, to give it, when it could not be avoided, in a
workhouse or house of correction, and, for the rest, to in-
crease the demand for labor by reducing wages.

The grand discovery of a commercial age, that relief
might be so administered as not merely to relieve, but also
to deter, still remained to be made by Utilitarian philoso-
phers. But the theory that distress was due, not to economic
circumstances, but to what the Poor Law Commissioners of
1834 called "individual improvidence and vice," was firmly
established, and the criticism on the Elizabethan system
which was to inspire the new Poor Law had already been
formulated. The essence of that system was admirably ex-
pressed a century later by a Scottish divine as "the principle
that each man, simply because he exists, holds a right on
other men or on society for existence. " 14° Dr. Chalmers'
attack upon it was the echo of a note long struck by Puri-
tan moralists. And the views of Dr. Chalmers had impressed
themselves on Nassau Senior,141 before he set his rr-md to
that brilliant, influential and wildly unhistorical Report,
which, after provoking something like a rebellion in the
north of England, was to be one of the pillars of the social
policy of the nineteenth century.

It would be misleading to dwell on the limitations of
Puritan ethics without emphasizing the enormous contribu-
tion of Puritanism to political freedom and social progress.
The foundation of democracy is the sense of spiritual inde-
pendence which nerves the individual to stand alone against
the powers of this world, and in England, where squire and
parson, lifting arrogant eyebrows at the insolence of the
lower orders, combined to crush popular agitation, as a
menace at once to society and to the Church, it is probable
that democracy owes more to Nonconformity than to any
other single movement. The virtues of enterprise, diligence
and thrift are the indispensable foundation of any complex
and vigorous civilization. It was Puritanism which, by in-
vesting them with a supernatural sanction, turned them

226 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT

from an unsocial eccentricity into a habit and a religion.
Nor would it be difficult to find notable representatives of
the Puritan spirit in whom the personal authority, which was
the noblest aspect of the new ideal, was combined with a
profound consciousness of social solidarity, which was the
noblest aspect of that which it displaced Firmm the philan-
thropist, and Sellers the Quaker, whom Owen more than a
century later hailed as the father of his doctrines, were
pioneers of Poor Law reform. The Society of Friends, in an
age when the divorce between religion and social ethics was
almost complete, met the prevalent doctrine, that it was
permissible to take such gain as the market offered, by in-
sisting on the obligation of good conscience and forbearance
in economic transactions, and on the duty to make the hon-
orable maintenance of the brother in distress a common
charge.142

The general climate and character of a country are not
altered, however, by the fact that here and there it has peaks
which rise into an ampler air. The distinctive note of Puri-
tan teaching was different. It was individual responsibility,
not social obligation. Training its pupils to the mastery of
others through the mastery of self, it prized as a crown
of glory the qualities which arm the spiritual athlete for his
solitary contest with a hostile world, and dismissed concern
with the social order as the prop of weaklings and the Capua
of the soul. Both the excellences and the defects of that
attitude were momentous for the future It is sometimes
suggested that the astonishing outburst of industrial activ-
ity which took place after 1760 created a new type of eco-
nomic character, as well as a new system of economic
organization. In reality, the ideal which was later to carry
all before it, in the person of the inventor and engineer and
captain of industry, was well established among Englishmen
before the end of the seventeenth century. Among the numer-
ous forces which had gone to form it, some not inconsider-
able part may reasonably be ascribed to the emphasis on
the life of business enterprise as the appropriate field for
Christian endeavor, and on the qualities needed for success
in it, which was characteristic of Puritanism. These qualities,
and the admiration of them, remained, when the religious
reference, and the restraints which it imposed, had weak-
ened or disappeared.

CHAPTER V

Conclusion

"Ther is a certaine man that shortly after my fyrst sermon, beynge
asked if he had bene at the sermon that day, answered, yea I praye
you, said he, how lyked you hym? Mary, sayed he, even as I lyked
hym alwayes — a seditious fellow "

LATIMBR, Seven Serin om before King Edward VI.

SOCIETIES, like individuals, have their moral crises and their
spiritual rpvn^jHnrK The student can observe the results
which these cataclysms produce, but he can hardly without
presumption attempt to appraise them, for it is at the fire
which they kindled that his own small taper has been lit.
The rise of a naturalistic science of society, with all its mag-
nificent promise of fruitful action and of intellectual light;
the abdication of the Christian Churches from departments
of economic conduct and social theory long claimed as their
province; the general acceptance by thinkers of a scale of
ethical values, which turned the desire for pecuniary gain
from a perilous, if natural, frailty into the idol of philoso-
phers and the mainspring of society — such movements are
written large over the history of the tempestuous age which
lies between the Reformation and the full light of the
eighteenth century. Their consequences have been worked
into the very tissue of modern civilization Posterity still
stands too near their source to discern the ocean into which
these streams will flow

In an historical age the relativity of political doctrines is
the tritest of commonplaces. But social psychology contin-
ues too often to be discussed in serene indifference to the
categories of time and place, and economic interests are still
popularly treated as though they formed a kingdom over
which the Zeitgeist bears no sway. In reality, though in-
herited dispositions may be constant from generation to
generation, the system of valuations, preferences and ideals
— the social environment within which individual character
functions — is in process of continuous change, and it is in
the conception of the place to be assigned to economic in-
terests in the life of society that change has in recent
centuries been most comprehensive in its scope, and most

227

228 CONCLUSION

sensational in its consequences. The isolation of economic
aims as a specialized object of concentrated and systematic
effort, the erection of economic criteria into an independent
and authoritative standard of social expediency, are phe-
nomena which, though familiar enough in classical antiquity,
appear, at least on a grand scale, only at a comparatively
recent date in the history of later civilizations The conflict
between the economic outlook of East and West, which im-
presses the traveller today, finds a parallel in the contrast
between medieval and modern economic ideas, which strikes
the historian.

The elements which combined to produce that revolution
are too numerous to be summarized in any neat formula.
But, side by side with the expansion of trade and the rise
of new classes to political power, there was a further cause,
which, if not the most conspicuous, was not the least funda-
mental. It was the contraction of the territory within which
the spirit of religion was conceived to run. The criticism
which dismisses the concern of Churches with economic
relations and social organization as a modern innovation
finds little support in past history. What requires explana-
tion is not the view that these matters are part of the prov-
ince of religion, but the view that they are not When the
age of the Reformation begins, economics is still a branch
of ethics, and ethics of theology; all human activities are
treated as falling within a single scheme, whose character is
determined by the spiritual destiny of mankind, the appeal
of theorists is to natural law, not to utility, the legitimacy
of economic transactions is tried by reference, less to the
movements of the market, than to moral standards derived
from the traditional teaching of the Christian Church, the
Church itself is regarded as a society wielding theoretical,
and sometimes practical, authority in social affairs. The
secularization of political thought , which was to be the work
of the next two centuries, had profound reactions on social
speculation, and by the Restoration the whole perspective,
at least in England, has been revolutionized Religion has
been converted from the keystone which holds together the
social edifice into one department within it, and the idea
of a rule of right is replaced by economic expediency as the
arbiter of policy and the criterion of conduct. From a spirit-
ual being, who, in order to survive, must devote a reasonable

CONCLUSION 229

attention to economic interest, man seems sometimes to have
become an economic animal, who will be prudent, never-
theless, if he takes due precautions to assure his spiritual
well-being.

The result is an attitude which forms so fundamental a
part of modern political thought, that both its precarious
philosophical basis, and the contrast which it offers with the
conceptions of earlier generations, are commonly forgotten.
Its essence is a dualism which regards the secular and the
religious aspects of life, not as successive stages within a
larger unity, but as parallel and independent provinces,
governed by different laws, judged by different standards,
and amenable to different authorities. To the most repre-
sentative minds of the Reformation, as of the Middle Ages,
a philosophy which treated the transactions of commerce
and the institutions of society as indifferent to religion would
have appeared, not merely morally reprehensible, but intel-
lectually absurd. Holding as their first assumption that the
ultimate social authority is the will of God, and that tem-
poral interests are a transitory episode in the life of spirits
which are eternal, they state the rules to which the social
conduct of the Christian must conform, and, when circum-
stances allow, organize the discipline by which those rules
may be enforced. By their successors in the eighteenth cen-
tury the philosophy of Indifferentism, though rarely formu-
lated as a matter of theory, is held in practice as a truism
which it is irrational, if not actually immoral, to question,
since it is in the heart of the individual that religion has its
throne, and to externalize it in rules and instructions is to
tarnish its purity and to degrade its appeal Naturally,
therefore, they formulate the ethical principles of Christian-
ity in terms of a comfortable ambiguity, and rarely indicate
with any precision their application to commerce, finance,
and the ownership of property Thus the conflict between
religion and those natural economic ambitions which the
thought of an earlier age had regarded with suspicion is
suspended by a truce which divides the life of mankind
between them The former takes as its province the individ-
ual soul, the latter the intercourse of man with his fellows
in the activities of business and the affairs of society. Pro-
vided that each keeps to his own territory, peace is assured.
They cannot collide, for they can never meet.

230 CONCLUSION

History is a stage where forces which are within human
control contend and cooperate with forces which are not.
The change of opinion described in these pages drew nour-
ishment from both. The storm and fury of the Puritan
revolution had been followed by a dazzling outburst of
economic enterprise, and the transformation of the material
environment prepared an atmosphere in which a judicious
moderation seemed the voice at once of the truest wisdom
and the sincerest piety. But the inner world was in motion
as well as the outer. The march of external progress woke
sympathetic echoes in hearts already attuned to applaud its
triumph, and there was no consciousness of an acute tension
between the claims of religion and the glittering allurements
of a commercial civilization, such as had tormented the age
of the Reformation.

It was partly the natural, and not unreasonable, diffidence
of men who were conscious that traditional doctrines of
social ethics, with their impracticable distrust of economic
motives, belonged to the conditions of a vanished age, but
who lacked the creative energy to state them anew, in a
form applicable to the needs of a more complex and mobile
social order. It was partly that political changes had gone
far to identify the Church of England with the ruling aris-
tocracy, so that, while in France, when the crash came, many
of the lower clergy threw in tneir lot with the tiers etat, in
England it was rarely that the officers of the Church did not
echo the views of society which commended themselves to
the rulers of the State. It was partly that, to one important
body of opinion, the very heart of religion was a spirit which
made indifference to the gross world of external circum-
stances appear, not a defect, but an ornament of the soul.
Untrammelled by the silken chains which bound the Estab-
lishment, and with a great tradition of discipline behind
them, the Nonconformist Churches might seem to have pos-
sessed opportunities of reasserting the social obligations of
religion with a vigor denied to the Church of England. What
impeded their utterance was less a weakness than the most
essential and distinctive of their virtues. Founded on the re-
pudiation of the idea that human effort could avail to win
salvation, or human aid to assist the pilgrim in his lonely
quest, they saw the world of business and society as a bat-
tlefield, across which character could march triumphant to

CONCLUSION 231

its goal, not as crude materials waiting the architect's hand
to set them in their place as the foundations of the King-
dom of Heaven. It did not occur to them that character is
social, and society, since it is the expression of character,
spiritual Thus the eye is sometimes blinded by light itself.

The certainties of one age areJJie problems of the next.
Few will refuse their admiration TO the magnificent concep-
tion of a community penetrated from apex to foundation by
the moral law, which was the inspiration of the great re-
formers, not less than of the better minds oi the Middle Ag^b.
But, in order to subdue the tough world of material inter-
ests, it is necessary to have at least so much sympathy w.th
its tortuous ways as is needed to understand them The
Prince of Darkness has a right to a courteous hearing and a
fair trial, and those who will not give him his due are wont
to find that, in the long run, he turns the tables by taking
his due and something over. Common sense and a respect
for realities are not less graces of the spirit than moral
zeal The paroxysms of virtuous fury, with which the chil-
dren of light denounced each new victory of economic enter-
prise as yet another stratagem of Mammon, disabled them
for the staff -work of their campaign, which needs a cool
head as well as a stout heart Their obstinate refusal to re-
vise old formulae in the light of new facts exposed them help-
less to a counter-attack, in which the whole fabric of their
philosophy, truth and fantasy alike, was overwhelmed to-
gether They despised knowledge, and knowledge destroyed
them.

Few can contemplate without a sense of exhilaration the
splendid achievements of practical energy and technical skill,
which, from the latter part of the seventeenth century, were
transforming the face of material civilization, and of which
England was the daring, if not too scrupulous, pioneer. If,
however, economic ambitions are good servants, they are
bad masters Harnessed to a social purpose, they will turn
the mill and grind the corn. But the question, to what end
the wheels revolve, still remains; and on that question the
naive and uncritical worship of economic power, which is
the mood of unreason too often engendered in those whom
that new Leviathan has hypnotized by its spell, throws no
light. Its result is not seldom a world in which men com-

232 CONCLUSION

mand a mechanism that they cannot fully use, and an or-
ganization which has every perfection except that of motion.

Er nennt's Vernunft und braucht's alletn,
Nur tierischer als jedes Tier zu sein

The shaft of Mephistopheles, which drops harmless from
the armor of Reason, pierces the lazy caricature which mas-
querades beneath the sacred name, to flatter its followers
with the smiling illusion of progress won from the mastery
of the material environment by a race too selfish and super-
ficial to determine the purpose to which its triumphs shall
be applied. Mankind may wring her secrets from nature,
and use their knowledge to destroy themselves; they
may command the Ariels of heat and motion, and bind
their wings in helpless frustration, while they wrangle over
the question of the master whom the imprisoned genii shall
serve. Whether the chemist shall provide them with the
means of life or with the tri-nitro-toluol and poison gas,
whether industry shall straighten the bent back to crush it
beneath heavier burdens, depends on an act of choice be-
tween incompatible ideals, for which no increase in the ap-
paratus of civilization at man's disposal is in itself a sub-
stitute. Economic efficiency is a necessary element in the
life of any sane and vigorous society, and only the incorri-
gible sentimentalist will depreciate its significance. But to
convert efficiency from an instrument into a primary object
is to destroy efficiency itself For the condition of effective
action in a complex civilization is cooperation. And the con-
dition of cooperation is agreement, both as to ends to which
effort should be applied, and the criteria by which its suc-
cess is to be judged.

Agreement as to ends implies the acceptance of a stand-
ard of values, by which the position to be assigned to dif-
ferent objects may be determined. In a world of limited
resources, where nature yields a return only to prolonged
and systematic effort, such a standard must obviously take
account of economic possibilities. But it cannot itself be
merely economic, since the comparative importance of eco-
nomic and of other interests — the sacrifice, for example, of
material goods worth incurring in order to extend leisure,
or develop education, or humanize toil — is precisely the point

CONCLUSION 233

on which it is needed to throw light It must be based on
some conception of the requirements of human nature as
a whole, to which the satisfaction of economic needs is evi-
dently vital, but which demands the satisfaction of other
needs as well, and which can organize its activities on a
rational system only in so far as it has a clear apprehension
of their relative significance. "Whatever the world thinks,"
wrote Bishop Berkeley, "he who hath not much meditated
upon God7 the human mind and the summum bonum may
possibly make a thriving earthworm, but will most indubi-
tably make a sorry patriot and a sorry statesman." The phi-
losopher of today, who bids us base our hopes of progress
on knowledge inspired by love, does not differ from the
Bishop so much, perhaps, as he would wish. The most ob-
vious facts are the most easily forgotten Both the existing
economic order, and too many of the projects advanced
for reconstructing it, break down through their neglect of
the truism that, since even quite common men have souls,
no increase in material wealth will compensate them for
arrangements which insult their self-respect and impair
their freedom A reasonable estimate of economic organiza-
tion must allow for the fact that, unless industry is to be
paralyzed by recurrent revolts on the part of outraged hu-
man nature, it must satisfy criteria which are not purely
economic A reasonable view of its possible modifications
must recognize that natural appetites may be purified or re-
strained, as, in fact, in some considerable measure they al-
ready have been, by being submitted to the control of some
larger body of interests. The distinction made by the phi-
losophers of classical antiquity between liberal and servile
occupations, the medieval insistence that riches exist for
man, not man for riches, Ruskin's famous outburst, "there
is no wealth but life," the argument of the Socialist who
urges that production should be organized for service, not
for profit, are but different attempts to emphasize the in-
strumental character of economic activities by reference to
an ideal which is held to express the true nature of man.
Of that nature and its possibilities the Christian Church
was thought, during the greater part of the period discussed
in these pages, to hold by definition a conception distinc-
tively its own. It was therefore committed to the formula-
tion of a social theory, not as a philanthropic gloss upon the

234 CONCLUSION

main body of its teaching, but as a vital element in a creed
concerned with the destiny of men whose character is
formed, and whose spiritual potentialities are fostered or
starved, by the commerce of the market-place and the in-
stitutions of society. Stripped of the eccentricities of period
and place, its philosophy had as its center a determination
to assert the superiority of moral principles over economic
appetites, which have their place, and an important place,
in the human scheme, but which, like other natural appe-
tites, when flattered and pampered and overfed, bring ruin
to the soul and confusion to society. Its casuistry was an
attempt to translate these principles into a code of practical
ethics, sufficiently precise to be applied to the dusty world
of warehouse and farm. Its discipline was an effort, too often
corrupt and pettifogging in practice, but not ignoble in con-
ception, to work the Christian virtues into the spotted tex-
ture of individual character and social conduct. That prac-
tice was often a sorry parody on theory is a truism which
should need no emphasis But in a world where principles
and conduct are unequally mated, men are to be judged by
their reach as well as by their grasp — by the ends at which
they aim as well as by the success with which they attain
them. The prudent critic will try himself by his achieve-
ment rather than by his ideals, and his neighbors, living and
dead alike, by their ideals not less than by their achieve-
ment.

Circumstances alter from age to age, and the practical
interpretation of moral principles must alter with them. Few
who consider dispassionately the facts of social history will
be disposed to deny that the exploitation of the weak by
the powerful, organized for the purposes of economic gain,
buttressed by imposing systems of law, and screened by dec-
orous draperies of virtuous sentiment and resounding rhet-
oric, has been a permanent feature in the life of most com-
munities that the world has yet seen. But the quality in
modern societies which is most sharply opposed to the teach-
ing ascribed to the Founder of the Christian Faith lies deep-
er than the exceptional failures and abnormal follies against
which criticism is most commonly directed. It consists in
the assumption, accepted by most reformers with hardly
less naivete than by the defenders of the established order,
that the attainment of material riches is the supreme object

CONCLUSION 23$

of human endeavor and the final criterion of human success.
Such a philosophy, plausible, militant, and not indisposed,
when hard pressed, to silence criticism by persecution, may
triumph or may decline What is certain is that it is the
negation of any system of thought or morals which can,
except by a metaphor, be described as Christian. Compro-
mise is as impossible between the Church of Christ and the
idolatry of wealth, which is the practical religion of cap-
italist societies, as it was between the Church and the State
idolatry of the Roman Empire.

"Modern capitalism/' writes Mr. Keynes, "is absolutely
irreligious, without internal union, without much public
spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of pos-
sessors and pursuers." It is that whole system of appetites
and values, with its deification of the life of snatching to
hoard, and hoarding to snatch, which now, in the hour of
its triumph, while the plaudits of the crowd still ring in the
ears of the gladiators and the laurels are still unfaded on
their brows, seems sometimes to leave a taste as of ashes on
the lips of a civilization which has brought to the conquest
of its material environment resources unknown in earlier
ages, but which has not yet learned to master itself. It was
against that system, while still in its supple and insinuating
youth, before success had caused it to throw aside the mask
of innocence, and while its true nature was unknown even
to itself, that the saints and sages of earlier ages launched
their warnings and their denunciations. The language in
which theologians and preachers expressed their horror of
the sin of covetousness may appear to the modern reader
too murkily sulphurous, their precepts on the contracts of
business and the disposition of property may seem an im-
practicable pedantry. But rashness is a more agreeable fail-
ing than cowardice, and, when to speak is unpopular, it is
less pardonable to be silent than to say too much. Posterity
has, perhaps, as much to learn from the whirlwind eloquence
with which Latimer scourged injustice and oppression as
from the sober respectability of the judicious Paley — who
himself, since there are depths below depths, was regarded
as a dangerous revolutionary by George III.

NOTES

PREFACE TO 19 ^ 7 EDITION

1 References to some of the earlier literature will be found in the
notes on subsequent chapters The following list of recent books and
articles is not exhaustive, but it mav be of some use to those inter-
ested in the subject.

E Troeltcch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, 2 vols.,
London, 1931 (Eng trans by Olive Wyon) of his Die Soziallehren der
Chruthchcn Kirchen und Grupp(n, 1912), Max Weber, The Prot-
estant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, London, 1930 (Eng trans,
by Talcott Parsons of Die Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des
Kapitahsmus in "Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik,"
vols. xx (1904) and xxi (1905), later reprinted in Gesammelte Auf-
salze zur Rehgionssoziologie, 3 vols , Tubingen, 1921) , H Hauser, Les
debuts du Capitahsme, Pans, 1927, chap li (Les Idees economiques
de Calvin") , B Groethuysen, Ongmes de V esprit bourgeois en France,
Pans, 1927; Margaret James, Social Problems and Policy during the
Puritan Revolution, 1640 1660, London, 1930, Isabel Grubb, Quaker-
ism and Industry before 1800, London, 1930, W J Warner, The
Wedeyun Movement in the Industrial Revolution, London, 1930; R.
Pascal, The Social Basis of the German Reformation, London, 1933;
H M Robertson, The Rise of Economic Individualism, Cambridge,
1913, A Fanfam, Le Origmi dello Spirito Capitahstico tn Italia,
Milan, 19,53, and Cattolici\mo e Protfstantenmo nella Formaztone
Stonca del Capitahsmo, Milan, 1934 (Eng; trans Catholicism, Prot-
estantism and Capitalism, London, 1935), J Brodrick, S J., The
Economic Morals of the Jesuits, London, 1934, E D Bebb, Non-
conformity and Social and Economic Life, 1660-1800, London, 1935
The articles include the following M Halbwachs, Les Origmes Puri-
taines du Capitahsme Moderne" (Revue d'hutoire et de Philoso-
phic rehgieuses, March-April, 1925) and "Economistes et Historiens,
Max Weber, une vie, un oeuvre" (Annales d'Histoire £conomique et
Sociale, No. 1, 1929) ; H See, "Dans quelle mesure Puritams et Juifs
ont-ils contnbue au Progres du Capitahsme Moderne'*" (Revue
Htstonque, t CLV, 1927), Kemper Fullerton, "Calvinism and Cap-
italism" (Harvard Theological Review, July 1928) ; F H Knight,
''Historical and Theoretical Issues in the Problem of Modern Cap-
italism" (Journal of Economic and Business History, November
1Q28) , Talcott Parsons, "Capitalism in Recent German Literature"
(Journal of Political Economy, December 1928 and February 1929) ;
P. C Gordon Walker, "Capitalism and the Reformation" (Economic
History Review, November 1937).

2 For Weber's life and personality, see Marianne Weber, Max
Weber, ein Lebensbild, Tubingen, 1926, and Karl Jaspers, Max Weber,
Deutschvs Wesen im politischen Denken, im Forschen und PhUoso-
phieren, Oldenburg, 1932

8 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
Eng trans , p. 183.

237

238 NOTES

4 H. M. Robertson, Aspects of the Rise of Economic Individualism,
p xii.

8 Weber, op cit , p 26
"Weber, op cit , p 183.

7 Ibid, p 183, and note 118 on chap v "it would have been easy
to proceed . to a regular construction which logically deduced
everything characteristic of modern culture from Protestant nation-
alism But that sort ol thing may be left to the type of dilettante
who believes in the unity of the group mind and its redu ability to a
single formula " "Spiritual" is my rendering of the almost untrans-
latable " spintualistische kausale "

8 See below, note 32 on chap iv, pp. 247-8, and Max Weber, op
cit , pp. 3-11

" Weber, op cit , 197-8 A chapter expanding the same criticism is
contained in H M Robertson, Aspects of the Rise of Economic In-
dividualism, pp S7-87 The best treatment of the subject is that of
Brentano, Die Anfange des modernen Kapitahsmus, 1916, pp 117-^7,
and Der Wirtschaftendc Mensch in der Geschichte, Leipzig, 1923, pp
363 sq

10 See H M Robertson, op cit , pp 88-110 and 133-67, and J
Brodnck, S J , The Economic Morah of the Jesuits, which, in addi-
tion to correcting Robertson's errors, contains the be^t account of
the economic teaching of the Jesuits available in English

11 Eg, H Wiskemann, Darstellung der in Deutsthland zur Zeit
der Reformation henschenden Nationalokonomischen Amichten,
Leipzig, 1861, F Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, London,
1892, Introduction, Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, 1898,
chap [II, W Cunningham, Christianity and Social Questions, London,
1910 (see below, note 33 on chap iv) The last work, though pub-
lished seven years after the appearance of Weber's articles, does not
refer to them, nor is its argument similar to theirs

12 E g , H M Robertson, op cit , p xi "Many writers have taken
advantage of an unpopularity of Capitalism in the twentieth century
to employ them [sc the theories ascribed to Weber] in attacks on
Calvinism, or on other branches of religion " The only Guy Fawkes
of the gang — apart, of course, from myself — detected by Mr Robert-
son actually firing the tram appears to be that implacable incendiary,
Mr Aldous Huxley "Infected," like the arch-conspirator, Weber",
"with a deep hatred of Capitalism/' we stand with him condemned of
"a general tendency to undermine the basis of Capitalist society"
(ibid, pp 207-8). The guilty secret is out at last

1SH Pirenne, Les Perwdes de I'Histoire Sociale due Capitalisme,
1914.

CHAPTER I

1 J B Say, Court complet d'Economic politique pratique, vol vi,
1829, pp. 351-2.

2R Torrens, An Essay on the Production of Wealth, 1821, Preface,
p. xiii.

3 Lloyd George at Portmadoc (Times, June 16, 1921)

4 J A Froude, Revival of Romanism, in Short Studies on Great
Subjects, 3rd ser , 1877, p 108

NOTES ON CHAPTER I 239

* J. N. Figgis, From Genon to Grotius, 1916, pp 21 seqq.

6 Locke, Two Treatises on Government, bk ii, chap, ix, §124.

7 Nicholas Oresme, c.1320-82, Bishop of Lisieux from 1377. His
Tractatus de engine, natura, jure et mutatwnibus monetarum was
probably written about 1360 The Latin and French texts have been
edited by Wolowski (Paris, 1864), and extracts are translated by
A. E. Monroe, Early Economic Thought, 1924, pp 81-102 Its signifi-
cance is discussed shortly bv Cunningham, Growth of English Indus-
try and Commerce, Early and Middle Ages (4th ed , 1905, pp 354-9),
and by Wolowski in his introduction The date of De Usuns of Lau-
rentius de Rodolfis was 1403; a short account of his theories as to
the exchanges will be found in E Schreiber, Die Wolkwirthschaft-
licfon Anschauungen der Scholastik seit Thomas v Aqum, 1913, pp.
211-17. The most important works of St Antonmo (1389-1459, Arch-
bishop of Florence, 1446) are the Summa Theologica, Summa Con-
fesstonalis, and De Uwns Some account of his teaching is given by
Carl Ilgner, Die wolkswirthschnfthchen Amchauungen Antomm von
Florcnz, 1904; Schreiber, op cit , pp 217-23, and Bede Jarrett, St.
Antomno and Mediaeval Economics, 1914 The full title of Baxter's
work is A Christian Directory: a Summ of Practical Theologie and
Cases of Conscience.

8 See Chap IV, p. 206

"Benvenuto da Imola, Comentum super Dantis Comoediam (ed
Lacaita), vol i, p 579; "Qui facit usuram vadit ad infernum; qui
non facit vadit ad inopiam" (quoted by G G Coulton, Social Life tn
Britain from the Conquest to the Reformation, 1919, p. 342).

10Lanfranc, Elucidanum, lib ii, p. 18 (in Opera, ed 'j. A Giles).
See also Vita Sancti Guidonis (Bollandtsts' Acta Sanctorum, Septem-
ber, vol iv, p 43 ) "Mercatura raro aut nunquam ab aliquo dm sine
crimine exercen potuit "

11 B L. Manning, The People's Faith in the Time of Wyclif, 1919,
p. 186.

12 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2a 2**, div. I, Q. Hi, art viii
18 Ibid , la 2«, div. i, Q xciv, art ii

14 The Bull Unam Sanctam of Boniface VIII

15 John of Salisbury, Polycraticus (ed C C I Webb), lib v, cap.
ii ("Est autem res publica, sicut Plutarco placet, corpus quoddam
quod divini munens beneficio ammatur"), and lib vi, cap. x, where
the analogy is worked out in detail For Henry VIII's chaplain sec
Starkey, A Dialogue between Cardinal Pole and Thomas Lupstt
(Early English Text Society, Extra Ser , no xxxu, 1878)

10 Chaucer, The P^rsone's Tale, § 66

17 On the Seven Deadly Sins, chap, xix (Select English Works of
John Wychf, ed T Arnold, vol. lii, 1871, p. 145).

18 John of Salisbury, op cit , lib vi, cap x: "Tune autem totius rei
pubhcae salus mcolumis praeclaraque erit, si supenora membra se im-
pendant inferioribus et inferiora superioribus pari jure respondeant,
ut singula sint quasi aliorum ad invicem membra "

^Wyclif, op. cit., chaps, ix, x, xi, xvii, passim (Works of Wyclif.
ed. T. Arnold, vol iii, pp 130, 131, 132, 134, 143).

80 See, e.g., A. Doren, Studien aus der Florentiner Wirthschaftsge-
schichte, 1901, vol. i, chaps, v, vii. His final verdict (p. 458) is; "Man

240 NOTES

kann es getrost aussprechen es gibt wohl keine Penodc in der WeH-
geschichte, m der die naturhche Uebermacht des Kapitals uber die
besitz- und kapitallose Handarbeit rucksichtsloser, freier von sitthchen
und rechtlichen Bedenken, naiver in ihrer sclbstverstadhchen Konse-
quenz gewaltet hatte, und bis m die entferntesten Folgen zur Geltung
gebracht worden ware, als in der Blutezeit der Florentmer Tuchin-
dustrie " The picture drawn by Pirenne of the textile industry in
Flanders (Belgian Democracy Its Early History, trans by J. V
Saunders, 1Q15, pp 128-34) is somewhat similar

121 In Jan 12Q8/Q there was held a "parliament of carpenters at
Milehende, where they bound themselves by a corporal oath not to
observe a certain ordinance or provision made bv the Mayor and Al-
dermen touching their craft," and m the following March a "parlia-
ment of smiths' was formed, with a common chest (Calendar of
Early Mayor's Court Rolls of the City of London, 12Q8-1307, ed
A H Thomas, 1Q24, pp 25, 33-34)

~~ The figures for Paris are the estimate of Martin Saint-Leon
(Hutotre des Copoiatiom de Meticn, 3rd ed , 1022, pp 21°-20, 224,
226) , those for Frankfurt are given by Bucher (Die Bevolkeiung von
Frankiurt am Mam im XIV und \V Jahrhundert, 1S86, pp 1CH, 116,
605) They do not include apprentices, and must not be pressed too
far The conclusion of Martin Saint-Leon is UI1 est certain qu'au
moyen age (abstraction faite des villes de Flandre) il n'existait pas
encore un proletariat, le nombre des ouvners ne depassant guere ou
n'atteignant meme pas celui des maitres" (op cit , p 227 n ) The
towns of Italy should be added, as an exception, to those of Flanders,
and in any case the statement is not generally true of the later Middle
Ages, when there was certainly a wage-earning proletariat in Ger-
many also (sec Lamprecht, Zum Verstandms der wirthschafthchen
und wztalen Wandlungen in Deutschland vom 14 znm 16 lahrhun-
dert, in the Zeitschnft for Sozial- und Wtrthichajtgeuhtchte, vol i,
pp 101-263), and even, though on a smaller scale, in England

w The Crete Sentence of Curs Expouned, chap xxvni (Select Eng-
lish Works of Wyclif, ed. T Arnold, vol m, p 3V>) The passage con-
tains comprehensive denunciations of all sorts of combination, in
particular, gilds, "men of sutel craft, as fre masons and othere," and
"marchaumtis, grocens, and vitilens" who "conspiren wickidly togidre
that noon of hem schal bic over a certeyn pns, though the thing that
thei bien be moche more worthi" (ibid , pp 333, 334)

Wyclif 's argument is of great interest and importance It is (1),
that such associations for mutual aid are unnecessary No special in-
stitutions are needed to promote fraternity, since, quite apart from
them, all members of the community are bound to help each other,
"Alle the goodnes that is in thes glides eche man owith for to do bi
comyn fraternytc of Cnsendom, by Goddis comaundemcnt " (2) That
combinations are a conspiracy against the public Both doctrines were
points in the case for the sovereignty of the unitarv State, and both
were to play a large part in subsequent history They were used by
the absolutist statesmen of the sixteenth century as an argument for
State control over industry, in place of the obstructive torpor of gilds
and boroughs, and by the individualists of the eighteenth century as
an argument for free competition The line of thought as to the re-

NOTES ON CHAPTER I 241

lation of minor associations to the State runs from Wyclif to Turgot,
Rousseau, Adam Smith, the \ct of the Legislative Assembly in 1792
forbidding trade unions ("Les citoyens de meme etat ou profession,
les ouvner et compagnons d'un art quelconque ne pourront . . for-
mer des reglements sur leurs pretendus interets communs"), and the
English Combination Acts

24 Kayser Sigtnunds Reformation alter Stande des Heihgen Rb-
mischen Reichs, printed by Goldast, Collectio Constitutionum 1m-
permltum, 1713, vol iv, pp 170-200 Its probable date appears to be
about 14^7 It is discussed shortly by J S Schapiro, Social Reform
and the Reformation, 1900, pp 03-9

-"'Martin Saint-Leon, op at , p 187 The author's remark is made
a propos ol a ruling of 1270, fixing minimum rates for textile workers
in Pans It appears, however, to be unduly optimistic The fact that
minimum rates were fixed for textile workers must not be taken as
evidence that that policy was common, tor in England, and probably
m France, the textile trades received special treatment, and minimum
rates were fixed for them, while maximum rates were fixed for other,
and much more numerous, bodies of workers What ic true is that the
medieval assumption with regard to wages, as with regard to the
much more important question of prices, was that it was possible to
bring them into agreement with an objective standard of equity,
which did not reflect the mere play of economic forces

*° "The Cardinals' Gospel," translated from the Carmina Burana
by G G Coulton, in A Medieval Garner, 1010, p 347

2~ Printed from the Carmina Buiana by S Gaselec, An Anthology
of Medieval Latin, 1925, pp 58-9

~'s Innocent IV gave them in 1248 the title of "Romans ecclesiae filii
speciales" (Ehrenberg, Das Zeitalter der Fugget, 1806, vol 11, p 66).

20 For Grosstete see Matthew Paris, Chronica Maiota, vol v, pp.
404-5 (where he is reported as denouncing the Cahurbines, ''whom in
our time the holy fathers and teachers had driven out of France,

but who have been encouraged and protected by the Pope in England,
which did not formerly suffer from this pestilence"), and F S Steven-
son, Robert Growteste, Bishop of Lincoln, 180Q, pp 101-4 For the
bishop of London and the Cahoi sines see Matthew Pans, Chron.
Maj , vol m, pp 331-2 A useful collection of references on the whole
subject is given by Ehrenberg, op at , vol n, pp 64-8

M Re girt rum FpHtolaritm J Peckham, vol i, p 18, July 1279 (trans-
lated by Coulton, Social Life in Britain from the Conquest to the
Reformation, p 345)

31 For cases of clerical usury see Selden Society, vol v, 1891, Leet
Jurisdiction in the City of Norwich, ed W. Hudson, p 35, Hist. MSS.
Conim , MSS of the Marquis of Lothian, 1905, p 26, and Th
Bonnin, Regestrum Vivtationum Odonis Rigaldi, 1852, p 35 See also
note 88 (below)

32 The Chapter of Notre-Dame appears to have lent money at in-
terest to the citizens of Paris (A Luchaire, Social France at the time
of Phthp Augustus, translated by E B Krehbiel, 1912, p 130) For
the bishop's advice to the usurer, see ibid , p 166

88 From a letter of St Bernard, cl!25, printed by Coulton, A Me-
atoeval Garner, pp. 68-73

242 NOTES

84 Aquinas, De Regimine Principium, lib. ii, cap i-vii, where the
economic foundations of a State are dscussed

85 Aquinas, Summa Theol , 2a 2re, Q. Ixxxiii, art vi For St Anto-
nino's remarks to the same purpose, see Jarrett, St. Antonmo and
Mediaeval Economics, p. 59.

^Gratian, Decretum, pt ii, causa xii, Q i, c ii, § 1.

87 A good account of St Antonmo's theory of property is given by
Ilgner, Die Volkswirthschafthchen Anschauungen Antonms von
Florenz, chap, x

38 uSed si esset bonus legislator m patria indigente, deberet locare
pro pretio magno huiusmodi mercatores . . . et non tantum eis et
famihse sustentationem necessanum in venire, sed etiam mdustnam, pe-
ritiam, et pencula omma locare, ergo etiam hoc possunt ipsi in ven-
dendo" (quoted Schreiber, Die Volkswirthschafthchen Anschauungen
der Scolastik seit Thomas v Aquin, p 154)

8W Henry of Ghent, Aurea Quodhbeta, p 42b (quoted Schreiber, op
cit., p. 135

40 Gratian, Decretum, pt. 1, dist Ixxxvm, cap xi

41 Aquinas, Summa Theol , 2a 2ffi, Q Ixxvh, art iv

**Ibid. Trade is unobjectionable, "cum aliquis negotiationi intendit
propter pubhcam utihtatem, ne scilicet res necessanae ad vitam patriae
desint, et lucrum expetit, non quasi finem, sed quasi stipendium
laboris."

43 Henry of Langenstem, Tractatus btpartibus dc contractibus emp-
tionis et vendtttonis, i, 12 (quoted Schreiber, op cit , p. 197).

44 See Chap II, § n

45 Examples of these stories are printed by Coulton, A Mediaeval
Garner, 1910, pp 212- LS, 298, and Social Life in England from the
Conquest to the Reformation, 1919, p 346.

46 The facts are given by Arturo Segre, Storia del Commercio, vol.
i, p 223 For a fuller account of credit and money-lending in Florence,
see Doren Studien aus der Florentiner Wuthwhaftsgeschichte, vol i,
pp 173-209

4' Bruno Kuske, Quellen zur Geschvchte des Kolner Handels und Ver-
kehrs im Mittelalter, vol ih, 1923, pp 197-8

48 Early English Text Society, The Coventry Leet Book, ed M D.
Harris, 1907-13, p 544

48 Wyclif , On the Seven Deadly Sins, chap xxiv (Works of IVycltf,
ed. T Arnold, vol m, pp 154-5) The word rendered "loan" is "leeve"
[? leene] in the text

80 For examples of such cases see Early Chancery Proceedings, Bdle
Ixiv, nos 291 and 1089, Bdle. xxxvii, no 38, Bdle, xlvi, no 307 They
are discussed in some detail in my introduction to Thomas Wilson's
Discourse upon Usury, 1925, pp 28-9

81 Hist MSS Com, of Marquis of Lothian, p 27, Selden Soc.,
Leet Jurisdiction in the City of Norwich, p 35

62 Aquinas, Summa Theol., la 2®, Q xcv, art. ii

M0w the Seven Deadly Sins, chap xxiv (Works of Wyclif, ed. T.
Arnold, vol. ni, p. 153). "Bot men of la we and marchauntis and
chapmen and vitelers synnen more in avarice then done pore laboreres.
And this token hereof; for now ben thei pore, ond now ben the!
ful riche, for wronges that thei done."

NOTES ON CHAPTER I 243

64 Eg, ^gidius Lessinus, De Usuris, cap ix, pt r "Tantum res
estimatur juste, quantum ad utihtatem possidentis refertur, et tan-
turn juste valet, quantum sine fraude vcndi potest Omnis trans-
latio farta hbera voluntate dommorum juste fit," Johannes Buri-
danus, Qucestiones supei deccm hbros Ethicorum Anstotelh, v, 23- "Si
iptui rem suam sic alienat, jpse secundum suam estimationem non
dammficatur, sed lucratur, igitur non injustum patitur." Both writ-
ers are discussed by Schreiber (op cit , pp 161-71 and 177-91) The
theory of Bundanus appears extraordinarily modern, but he is care-
ful to emphasize that prices should be fixed "secundum utilitatem et
necessitatem totius communitatis/' not "penes necessitatem ementis
vel vendentis "

r>r> St Antonio, Summa Theologica, pars n, tit i, cap vin, § I, and
chap xvi, § iii. An account of St Antonmo's theory of prices is given
b^ i Inner Die volkswirthschafthchen AmchdiMrren An<onms von
Florenz, chap, iv; Jarrett, St Antonino and Mediaeval Economics ,
and bchrciber, op at, pp 217-73 Us interest consists m the at-
tempts to maintain the principle of the just price, while making
allowance for practical necessities

r"'Henrv of Lnnc;enstein, Tantnt^\ bipartitus de contractibus emp-
tionis et vendttioms, i, 11, 12 (quoted Schreiber op cit , pp 198-200).

57 For these examples see Cat of Early Mayors Court Rolls of the
City of London, ed A H Thomas, pp 259-60; Records of the City
of 'Norwich, ed W Hudson and J C. Tingey, vol i, 1906, p 227;
Cal of Early Mayor's Court Rolls, p 132, J M Wilson, The Wor-
cester Liber Albus, 1920, pp 100-200, 212-13 The question of the
legitimacy of rent-charges and of the profits of partnership has been
fully discussed by Max Neumann, Geschichte des Wuchers m Deutsch-
land (1865), and b^ \*hley, Economic Theory See also G O'Brien,
An Essay on Medieval Economic Teaching (1920), and G G Coul-
ton, \n Episode in Canon Law (in History, July 1021), where the
difficult question raised by the Decretal Namganti is discussed.

'<h Bcrnardi Papiensn ^umma Decretahum (i«d K A L) Laspeyres,
1860) , lib v tit xv

50 Eg, ^gidius Lessinus, De Uwns, chap ix, pt n "Etiam res fu-
thra3 per tempora non sunt tanta? estimations, sicut ea?dcm collectae
in instanti, nrc lantam utilitatem mferunt possidentibus, propter quod
oportet, quod smt minons estimations secundum justitiam "

60 O'Brien, (op at.} appears, unless I misunderstand him, to take
this view

" Poli1*<*, T m ad fin 12^Sb S»e Who sard "Barren Metal"? by
E Cannan, W D Ross, etc , in Economica, June 1922, pp 105-7.

62 Innocent IV, Apparatus, lib v, De Usuris.

'''For Italy, see Arturo Se«re, Storm del Commerno, vol i, pp. 179-
91, and for France, P Boissonadc, Le Travail dans I'Europe chre-
tienne an Moyen Age, 1021, pp 206-9, 212-13 Both emphasize the
financial relations of the Papacy

64 Eg, Council of Aries, 314, Nicaea, 325, Laodicea, 372, and many
others

65 Corpus Juris Canomci, Decretal Greg IX, lib v, tit xix, cap. i
** Ibid, cap hi

67 Ibid, Sexti Decretal, lib v tit v, cap i, ii

244 NOTES

88 Ibid., Clemen tinarum, lib. v, tit. v, cap. i.

^The passages referred to in this paragraph are as follows. Corp.
Jur. Can , Decretal. Greg IX, lib v, tit. xix, cap. ix, iv, x, xhi, xv,
ii, v, vi.

70 A Formulary oj the Papal Penitentiary in the Thirteenth Century,
ed. H C Lea, 1892, Nos. xcn, clxxvm (2), cixxix.

71 Raimundi de Penna-jorti Summa Pastoralis (Ravaisson, Catalogue
General des MSS. des Bibliotheques pubhques des Departements, 1849,
vol. i, pp. 592 seqq}. The archdeacon is to inquire "Whether [the
priest] feeds his flock, assisting those who are in need and above all
those who are sick Works of mercy also are to be suggested by the
archdeacon, to be done by him for their assistance. If he cannot fully
accomplish them out of his own resources, he ought, according to his
power, to use his personal influence to get from others the means of
carrying them out Inquiries concerning the parishioners are to be
made, both from the priest and from others among them worthy of
credence, who, if necessary, are to be summoned for the purpose to the
presence of the archdeacon, as well as from the neighbours, with re-
gard to matters which appear to need correction. First, inquiry is to be
made whether there are notorious usurers, or persons reputed to be
usurers, and what sort of usury they practise, whether any one, that
is to say, lends money or anything else . . on condition that he re-
ceive anything above the principal, or holds any pledge and takes
profits from it in excess of the principal, or receives pledges and uses
them in the meantime for his own gam, . . . whether he holds horses
in pledge and reckons in the cost of their fodder more than they can
eat or whether he buys anything at a much lower price than it
is worth, on condition that the seller can take it back at a fixed term
on paying the price, though the buyer knows that he (the seller) will
not be able to do so; or whether he buys anything for a less price
than it is worth, because he pays before receiving the article, for ex-
ample, standing corn; or whether any one, as a matter of custom and
without express contract, is wont to take payment above the princi-
pal, as the Cahorsines do Further, it is to be inquired whether
he practises usury cloaked under the guise of a partnership (nomine
societatis palhatam), as when a man lends money to a merchant, on
condition that he be a partner in the gains, but not in the losses.
. . . Further, whether he practises usury cloaked under the guise of a
penalty [for non-payment at a given date! is not that he may be
paid more quickly, but that he may be paid more Further, whether
he practises usury in kind, as when a rich man, who has lent money,
will not receive from a poor man any money above the principal, but
agrees that he shall work two days in his vineyard, or something of
the kind Further, whether he practises usury cloaked by reference to
a third party, as when a man will not lend himself, but has a friend
whom he induces to lend When it has been ascertained how many
persons in that parish are notorious for usury of this kind, their
names are to be reduced to writing, and the archdeacon is to proceed
against them in virtue of his office, causing them to be cited to his
court on a day fixed, either before himself or his responsible offical,
even if there is no accuser, on the ground that they are accused by
common report. If thev are convicted, either because their offence is

NOTES ON CHAPTER I 245

evident, or by their own confession, or by witnesses, he is to punish
them as he thinks best If they cannot be directly convicted, by

reason of their manifold shifts and stratagems, nevertheless their ill
fame as usurers can easily be established . . If the archdeacon pro-
ceed with caution and diligence against their wicked doings, they will
hardly be able to hold ther own or to escape— it, that is he vex

them with trouble and expense, and humiliate them, by frequently
serving citations on them and assigning several different days for their
trial, so that by trouble, expense, loss of time, and all manner of
confusion they may be induced to repent and submit themselves to
the discipline of the Church "

u E Martene and U Durand, Thesaurus novus Anecdotorum, 1717,
vol iv, pp 6-96 seqq

7iPecock, The Represser of over-much blaming of the Clergy, ed.
C Babington, 1860, pt i, chap in, pp 15-16 His words show both
the difficulties which confronted ecclesiastical teaching and the at-
tempts to overcome them "I preie thee seie to me where in Holi
Scripture is \oven the hundnd parti of the techmg upon matnmonie
which y teche in a book mad upon Matnmomc, and in the 1irste partie
of Crist en religioun Seie to me also where m Holi Scripture is
yoven the hundnd part of the techng which is yoven upon usure in
the thndde parti of the book yclepid The filling of the tiij tables;
and yit al thilk hool techmg yoven upon usure in the now named
book is Iitil ynough or ouer litlc for to leerne, knowe and have suffi-
cienth into manni^ behove and into Goddis trewe service and lawe
kepmg what is to be Icerned and kunnen aboute usure, as to reeders
and studiers ther yn it muste needis be open Is ther eny more writen
of usure in al the Newe Testament save this, Luke vi, 'Gevc ve loone,
hoping no thing; ther of,' and al that is of usure writen in the Gold
Testament favounth rather usure than it reproveth How evere, ther-
fore, schulde eny man seie that the sufficient leernyng and kunnyng
of usure or of the vertu contrane to usure is groundid m Holi Scrip-
ture? Howe evere sch.il thilk htil now rehercid clausul, Luke vi, be
sufficient for to answere and assoile alle the harde scrupulose doutis
and questiouns which al dai han neede to be assoiled ih mennis bar-
genyngis and cheffarmgis togidere? Erh man having to do with suche
questiouns mai soone se that Holi Writt geveth htil or noon light
thereto at al Forwhi al that Holi Writt seith ther to is that he for-
bedith usure, and therfore al that mai be take therbi is this, that
usure is unleeful, but though y bileeve herbi that usure is unleeful,
how schal y wite herbi what usure is, that y be waar for to not do it,
and whanne in a bargcyn is usure, though to summen seemeth noon,
and how in a bargeyn is noon usure though to summen ther semeth
to be?"

Perock's defence of the necessity of commentaries on the teaching
of Scripture was the real answer to the statement afteruards made
by Luther that the text, "Love thy neighbour as thyself," was an all-
sufficient guide to action (see Chap II, p 99) Examples of teaching
as to usury contained in books such as Pecock had in mind will be
found in Myrc's Instructions for Parish Priests (Early English Text
Society, ed E Peacock and F. J. Furnivall, 1902), the Puptlla Oculi,

246 NOTES

and Dan Michel's Ayenbite of Inwyt (Early English Text Society, ed
R. Morris, 1866).

14 The Catechism of John Hamilton, Archbishop of St Andrews,
1552, ed. T G Law, 1884, pp 07-9 Under the seventh command-
ment are denounced "Fyfthe, al thay that defrauchs or spoulyeis the
common geir, agams the common weill for lufe of their awm prvvate
and singulare weill Saxtlie, all usurans and ocknans agam? this com-
mand, that wil nocht len thair geir frelie, hot makis conditione of
ockir, aganis the command of Chnste Sevmthe, all thay quhilk hais
servandis or work men and wyll nocht pay theim thair fee or waige,
accordyng to conclitioun and thair deservyng, quilk syn, as sanct
James sayis, cryis vengeance before God Auchthe, all thai that strykis
cowyne of unlauchful metall, quhair throuch the common well is
hurt and skaithit The nynte, all Merchandis that sellis corruppit and
cvyll stufe for gude, and gyf thay or ony uther in bymg or selKng
use desait, falsate, parjune, wran? mettis or weychtis, to the skaith of
thair nychtbour, thay committ gret syn agane thi^ command Nother
can we clenge fra breakyng of this command all kyndis of craftis men
quhilk usis nocht thair awm craft leillahe and trewlie a? thai suld
do . All wrechis that wyl be ground ryche mcontynent, quhay be
fraud, falset, and gyle twynnis men and thair geir, quhay may keip
thair nychbour fra povertie and myschance and dois it nocht Quha>
takis ouer sair mail, ouer mekle feime or onv blake maillis fra thair
tennands, or puttis thair cottans to ouir sair labouns, quhair throw
the tenentis and cottans is put to herschip Quha mvies hi* nych-
bouris gud fortune, ouir byis him or takis his geir out of his handis
with fair hechtis, or prevent him, or begyle5; him at his marchandis
hand " The detail in which different forms of commercial sharp prac-
tice are denounced is noticeable

"See eg Matt Pans, Chron May , vol m, pp 101-2, for the case
of a priest who, for refusing to give Christian burial to an excom-
municate usurer, is seized by order of the County of Brittany and
buried alive, bound to the dead man See also Material for the His-
tory of Thomas Becket, vol v, p 38

Harduin, Ada Concihorum, vol vn, pp 1017-20, "Anno praedicto
[14851 diebus Mercurn et Jovis praedictis, scilicet ante Ramos Pal-
marum, ibidem apud Vicanum, in claustro ecclesiae de Vicano, coram
domino archiepiscopo, et mandata sui, personae infrascriptse, paro-
chiani de Guorgonio, qui super usuraria pravitate erant quam plun-
num diffamati, coram domino propter hoc vocati abjuraverunt et
per mandatum dommi summas mfrascnptas, quas se confessi fuerunt
hubuisse per usuranam pravitatem, per juramentum suum restituere
promiserut, et stare juri super his coram eo Bertrandus de Faveriis
abjuratus usuras, ut praemittitur, promisit restituere centum sohdos
monetae antiquae ' quos, prout ipse confessus est, habuerat per usura-
rium pravitatem . . " Thirty-six more cases were treated in this way

"Villani, Cronica, book xii, chap Ivni (ed 1823, vol vi, p 142)
Villani complains of the conduct of the inquisitor- "Ma per attignere
danari, d'ogni piccola parola oziosa che alcuno dicesse per iniquita
contra Iddio, o dicesse che usura non fosse peccato mortale, o simili
parole, condannava in grossa somma di danari, secondo che Tuomo
era ricco "

NOTES ON «"H \?TER I 247

n Constitutions of Clarendon, cap 15 "Placita de debitis, quae fid«
interposita debentur, vel absquc mterpositione fidei, smt in justitia
regis " On the whole subject see Pollock and Maitland, History of
English Law, 2nd ed , 1808, vol 11, pp 197-202, and F Makower,
Constitutional History of the Church of England, 1705, § 60.

79 Cat of Early Mavor's Court Roils of the City of London, ed. A.
H Thomas, pp 44, 88, 156, 235, Selden Soc , Borough Customs, ed.
M Bateson, vol 11, 1906, pp 161 (London) and 200-10 (Dublin);
Records of Leicester, ed M Bateson, vol ii, 1901, p. 4Q For similar
prohibitions by manorial courts, see Htst MSS. Com , MSS. of Mar-
quis of Lothian, p 28, and G P Scrope, History of the Manor and
Barony of Castl* Combe, 1852, p 238.

** Atinales de Burton, p 256, Wilkms, Concilia, vol 11, p. 115; Rot.
Parl , vol ii, p 1296

SJ Cat of Letter Books of the City of London, ed R R Sharpe,
vol H, pp 23-4, 24-5, 27, 28, 200/206-7, 261-2, 365, Liber Albus,
bk m, pt 11, pp 77, 315, 394-401, 683, Selden Soc, Left Jurisdiction
in the City of Norwich, p V5 , Hist MSS Com , MSS. of Marquis of
Lothian, pp 26, 27

82 Rot Parl, vol 11, pp 332a,, 350&

83 R H Morris, Chester in the Plantagenet and Tudor Reigns. 1894
(?), p 190

84 Early Chancery Proceedings, Bdle xi, no 307 ; Bdle xxix, nos
193-5; Bdle. xxxi, nos 96-100, 527, Bdle Ix, no 20, Bdle Ixiv, no.
1080 See also Year Books and Pica Rolls as Sources of Historical In-
formation, by H G Richardson, m Tram Royal Historical Society,
4th series, vol v, 1822, pp 47-8

85 Ed Gibson, Codex Juris Ecclesiastical Angltcam, 2nd ed , 1761, p.
1026

86 15 Ed III, st I, c. 5; 3 Hen VII, c 5, n Hen Vll, c 8; 13
Ehz c 8, 21 Jac I, c. 17

87 Cal of Early Mayor's Court Rolls of City of London, ed A. H.
Thomas, pp 1, 12, 28-9, 33-4, 44, 52, 88, 141, 156, 226, 235, 251 The
cases of the smiths and spurriers occur on pp. 33-4 and 52. In the fif-
teenth century a gild still occasionally tried to entorce its rules by
proceedings m an ecclesiastical court (see Wm H Hale, A Series of
Precedents and Proceedings m Criminal Causes, 1847, nos xxxvi and
Ixviu, where persons breaking gild rules are cited before the Com-
missary's court).

*R Canterbury and York Soc , Registrum Thome Spofford, ed. A.
T Bannister, 1919, p. 52 (1424), and Surtees Society, vol cxxxviii,
The Register of Thomas of Corbndge, Lord Archbishop of York, ed
Wm Brown, 125, vol i, pp 187-8 "6 kal Mail, 1303 Wilton.' Lit-
tera testimonials super purgacione dommi Johanms de Multhorp, vi-
caru ecclesie de Carton', de usura sibi imposita Universis Chnsti fide-
libus, ad quos prcsentes httere pervenerint, pateat per easdem quod,
cum dommus Johannes de Multhorp', vicanus ecclesie de Carton*,
nostre diocesis, coram nobis Thoma, Dei gracia, etc., in visitacione
nostra super usura fuisset notatus, videlicet, quod mutuavit cuidam
Jollano de Bnddale, ut dicebatur, xxxiij s iiij d eo pacto quod idem,
vicanus ab eo reciperet per x annos annis smculis x s pro eisdem, de
quibus eciam dictum fuit quod prefatus Jollanus dicto vicario pro

248 NOTES

octo annis ex pacto satisfecit et solvt prediclo, eundcm vicanum su-
per hoc vocan fecimus coram nobis et ci objecimus suprachcta, que
ipse inficians constanctus atque negans se optull in forma juris super
hiis legitime purgaturum Nos autem eidem vicano purgacionem suam
cum sua sexta manu vicanorum et aliorum presbiterorum sui ordims
indiximus faciendam, quam die Venerib proxima ante festum aposto-
lorum Philippi et Jacobi (April 26), anno gracie m°ccc° tercio, ad
hoc sibi prcnxo, in maneno nostro de Wilton' super articulo lecipimus
supradicto, idemque vicanus unacum domirus Johanne, rectore eccle<-ie
B M. juxta portam castn de Eboraco, Johanne et Johanne, de Whar
rum et de Wyverthorp' ecclesiarum vicarns ac Roberto, Johanne,
Alano, Stepheno et Willelmo, de Nafferton', Driffeld1, Wetewang',
Foston' et Wmtrmgham ecclesiarum presbitens parochialibus ndedig-
nis, de memorato articulo legitime se purgavit , propter quod ipsum
vicanum sic purgatum pronunciamus et immunem sentcnciahter de~
claramus, restituentes eundem ad suam pnstinam bonam famam In
cujus rei testimonium sigillum nostrum presentibus est appensum ''

88 Early Chancery Proccedngs, Bide xvm, no 137, Bdle xix, no
215?5, Bdle xxiv, no 2^, Bdle xx\i, no U8 See also A Abiam, So-
cial England in the Fifteenth Century, 1909, pp 215-1 V In view of
tfeese examples, it seems probable that a more thorough examination
of the Early Chancery Proceedings would show that, even in the fif-
teenth century, the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts in matters
of contract and usury was of greater practical importance than has
sometimes been supposed

^Surtees Soc , vol Ixiv, 1874 (Acts of Chapter of the Collegiate
Church of Rjpon) contains more than 100 cases in which the court
deals with questions of contract, debt, etc The case which is dismissed
"propter civihtatem causae" occurs n 1532 (Surtees oc , vol xxi, 18*5,
Ecclesiastical Proceedings from the Courts of Durham, p 40)

91 Chetham Soc , vol \liv, 1001, Act Book of the Ecclesiastical Court
of Whalley, pp 15-16

82 Surtees Soc, vol Ixiv, 1775, Acts of Chapter of the Collegiate
Church of Ripon, p 26

98 Hale, op cit (note 87 above), no ccxxxvm

94 See Chap III, p 161

95 For parishes, see S 0 Addy, Church and Manor, 1913, chap xv,
where numerous examples are given For a gild which appears to have
acted as a bank, see Hist MSS Com, llth Report, 1887, Appx , pt
iii, p 228 (MSS of the Borough of Krng'\ Lynn], and for other ex-
amples of loans, H F Westlake, The Parish Gilds of Mediaeval Eng-
land, 191Q, pp 61-1, Records of the City of Oxford, ed Wm H Tur-
ner, 1880, p 8, Statutes of Lincoln Cathedral, ed C Wordsworth, pt
ii, 1807, pp 616-17, and G Unwm The Gilds and Companies of Lon-
don, 1908, p 121 For a hospital, see Hist MSS Com, 14th Report,
Appx, pt viu, 1805, p 120 (MSS of tin Corporation of Bury St
Edmunds], where 20d is lent (or given) to a poor man to buy seed
for his land A statement (made half a century after the Dissolution)
as to loans by monasteries is quoted by F A Gasquet, Henry VUl
and the English Monasteries, 7th ed , 1020, p. 4=?3; specfic examples
are not known to me.

MW H Bliss, Cal of Papal Letters, vol. i. pp 267-8

NOTES ON CHAPTER I 24$

"For the early history of the Monts de Piete see Halzapfel, Dfa
Anfange der Monies Pietatis (1903), and for their development iftt
the Low Countries, A Henne, Histoire du Regne de Charles-quint 0Q
Belgique, 1859, vol. v, pp. 220-3. For proposals to establish them in
England see SPD Ehz , vol ex, no 57 (printed m Tawney and
Power, Tudor Economic Documents, vol in, sect m, no 6) and my
introduction to Thomas Wilson's Discourse upon Usury, 1925, pp.
125-7.

HS Camden Soc , A Relation of the Island of England about the Year
1500 (translated from the Italian), 1847, p. 23.

"Lyndwood, Provinciale, sub. tit Usura, and Gibson, Codex /wr.
Eccl Angl , vol 11, p 1020.

100Pecock, The Repressor of over-much blaming of the Clergy, pt.
in, chap iv, pp 296-7 . "Also Crist sede here in this present proces, that
'at God' it is possible a nche man to entre into the kingdom of heuen;
that is to seie, with grace which God pro frith and geueth . . . though
he abide stille riche, and though withoute such grace it is ouer hard
to him being riche to entre Wherfore folewith herof openh, that it
is not forbodun of God eny man to be riche, for thanne noon sudi
man schulde euere entre heuen. . . And if it be not forbode eny man
to be nche, certis thanne it is leeful ynough ech man to be riche; in
lasse than he vowe the contrane or that he knowith bi assay and
experience him silf so miche mdisposid anentis nchessis, that he
schal not nowe rcwle him silf aright anentis tho nchessis, for in thilk
caas he is bonde to holde him silf in poverte " The embarrassing
qualification at the end — which suggests the question, who then dare
be rich? — is the more striking because of the common-sense ration-
alism of the rest of the passage

101 Trithemius, quoted by J Janssen, History of the German People
at the close of the Middle Ages, vol ii, 1896, p. 102.

102 Cal. of Early Mayor's Court Rolls of the City of London, ed. A.
H. Thomas, pp. 157-8.

103 See A. Luchaire, Social France at the time of Philip Augusttu
(translated by E. B Krehbiel), pp 391-2, where an eloquent denun-
ciation by Jacques de Vitry is quoted

104 Topographer and Genealogist, vol. i, 1846, p. 35. (The writer is
a surveyor, one Humberstone )

105 See eg. Chaucer, The Persone's Tale, §§ 64-6 The parson ex-
presses the orthodox view that "the condicioun of thraldom and the
firste cause of thraldom is for sinne " But he insists that serfs and
lords are spiritually equal Thilke that thou clepest thy thralles been
goddes peple ; for humble folk been Cristes freendes "

10(! Gratian, Decretum, pt. ii, causa x, Q ii, c iii, and causa xii, Q,
ii, c. xxxix

107 Summa Theol., la 2*, Q. xciv, art v, § 3

108 An article of the German Peasants' program in 1525 declared:
"For men to hold as their own property . is pitiable enough, con-
sidering that Christ has delivered and redeemed us all, the lowly a*
well as the great, without exception, by the shedding of His precious
blood. Accordingly it is consistent with Scripture that we should ta<
free " (The program is printed in J. S. Schapiro, Social Reform <wwf !
the Reformation, 1909, pp. 137-42.) The rebels under Ket prayed'

NOTES

"that all bondmen may be made free, for God freed them all with
His precious blood-shedding" (printed m Bland, Brown, and^ Tawney,
English Economic History, Select Documents, pt. h, sect, i, no. 8).

CHAPTER II

I A Lecture on the Studv of History, delivered at Cambridge, June
11, 1895, by Lord Acton, p 9.

2W Sombart (Der moderne Kapitahsmus, 1916, vol i, pp 524-6)
gives fact and figures See also J Strieder, Studien zur Geschvchte
kapitahstischer Organizations] or men, 1914, kap i, ii

3E R Daenell, Die Blutezett der Deutschen Han\e, 1905, Schanz,
Englische Handehpohtik gegcn das Ende des Mittelalten, vol 1 ,
N S. B Gras, The Early English Customs System, 1918, pp 452-514

4 E.g , The Fugger News-Letters, 156S-1605, ed. V von Klarwill,
trans P de Chary, 1924

5E Alben, Le Relazwne degli Ambasciatori Venett al Senato, serie
1, vol in, 1853, p 357 (Relazwne de Filippo 11 Re di Spagna da
Michele Soriano nel 1559} "Questi sono li tesori del re di Spagna,
queste le mimere, qucste Plndie che hanno sostentato 1'imprese dell'
Imperatore tanti anni "

6 The best contemporary picture of the trade of Antwerp is that of
L. Guicciardim, Descrittione di tutti i Paev Basv (1567), of which
part is reprinted in a French translation in Tawney and Power, Tudor
Economic Documents, vol in, pp 149-173 The best modern accounts
of Antwerp are given by Pirenne, Histoire de Belgique, vol ii, pp
399-403, and vol in, pp 259-72 , Ehrenberg, Das Zeitalter der Fugger,
vol. ii, pp 3-68; and J. A Gons, Etude sur les Colonies Marchandes
Meridionales a Anvcrs de 14S8 a 1$67 (102*)

7 The Meutmgs had opened a branch in Antwerp in 1479, the Hoch-
stetters m 1486, the Fuggers in 1508, the Welsers in 1509 (Pirenne,
op cit , vol in, p 261)

8 Pirenne, op cit, vol iii, pp 273-6
n Ehrenberg, op cit , vol n, pp 7-8

10 A short account of international financial rein lions in the sixteenth
century will be found in my introduction to Thomas Wilson's Dis-
course upon Usury, 1925, pp 68-86

II Erasmus, Adagia, see also The Complaint of Peace

"For the Fuggers, see Ehrenberg, op cit , vol i, pp 85-186, and
for the other German fiims mentioned, ibid , pp 187-260

18 See Gons, op cit., pp 510-45, where the reply of the Parsi theo-
logians is printed in full; and Ehrenberg, op cit, vol n, pp 18, 21.
For Bellarmin, see Gons, op cit , pp 551-2 A curious illustration of
the manner in which it was still thought necessary in the later six-
teenth century, and in Protestant England, to reconcile economic
policy with canonist doctrine, will be found m S P D Eliz . vol
Ixxv, no. 54 (printed in Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Doc-
uments, vol iii, pp 350-70) The writer, who is urging the repeal of
the Act of 1552 forbidding all interest whatever, cites Aquinas and
Hostiensis to prove that "trewe and unfayned interest" is not to be
condemned as usury.

"Ashley, Economic History, 1893, vol i, pt ii, pp 442-5

NOTES ON CHAPTER II 251

"Bodin. La Response de Jean Bodin aux Paradoxes in Malestroit
touchant I'enchenssement de toutes choses el le moyen d'y remedter.

16 See Max Neumann, Geschichte des Wuchers in Deutschland,
1865, pp 487 seqq

17 Calvin's views will be found in his Epistolce et Responsa, 1575,
pp 3S5-7, and in Sermon xxvm in the Opera

18 Bucer, De Regno Chnsti

19 Third Decade, 1st and 2nd Sermons, in The Decades of Henry
Bullmger (Parker Society), vol in, 1850

20 Luther, Kleiner Sermon vom Wucher (151Q) in Werke (Weimalr
ed ), vol vi, pp 1-8, Grosser Sermon vom Wucher (1520), in ibid.,
pp 33-60, Von Kaufshandlung and Wucher (1524), in ibid , vol XV,
pp 279-322, An die Pfarrherrn wider den Wucher zu predigen, Ver*
mahnung (1^40), in ibid , vol li, pp 32S-424

ai Hier musste man wahrhch auch den Fuckern und der gentlichen
GeselLschaft emen Zaum im Maul legen" (quoted by Ehrenberg, op.
at., vol 1, p 117 n )

"See pp 114-15

~lj Luther, Wider die taubenschen und mordenschen Rotten der
Kauern (1525), in Werke, vol xvm, pp 357-61

24Latimer, Sermon*;, Ponet, An Exhortation, or rather a Warning,
to the Lords and Commons; Crowley, The Way to Wealth, and
Epigrams (in Select Works of Robert Crowley, ed J M Cowper,
EETS, 1872), Lever, Sermons, 1^0 (English Reprints, ed. E.
Arber, 1895); Becon, The Jewel of Joy, 1553, Sandys, 2nd, 10th,
llth, and 12th of Sermons (Parker Society, 1841), Jewel, Works,
pt iv, pp 1293-8 (Parker Society, 1850) Citations from less well-
known writers and preachers will be found in J O W Haweis,
Sketches of the Reformation, 1844

2)Gairdner, Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, vol xvi, no 357.

20 Bossuet, Traite de I'Uwie For an account of his views, see
Favre, Le pret a inter et dans Vanaenne France

27 Brief Survey of the Growth of Usury in England with the Mis-
chiefs attending It, 1673

28 For an account of these changes see K Lamprecht, Zum Ver-
standniss der wirthschafthchen und sozialen Wandlungen m Deutich-
land vom 14 zum 16 Jahrhundert, in the Zeit^chnft fur Sozial- und
Wirthschuftsgcschichte, Bd i, 18Q3, pp 101 seqq

29 Lamprecht, op cit , and J S Schapiro, Social Reform and the
Reformation, 1909, pp 40-73

30 Schapiro, op cit , pp 20-39, and Stneder, op. cit (see note 2),
pp 156-212

31 For the so-called Reformation of the Emperor Sigismund see
Chap 1, note 24, and for the Peasants' Articles, ibid, note 108

152 For Geiler von Kaiserberg and Hipler see Schapiro, op cit., pp.
30, 126-31 For Hutten see H Wiskemann, Dartstellung der in
Deutschland zur Zeit der Reformation herrschenden Nationalokono-
mischen Ansichten, 1861, pp. 13-24

88 Quoted W. Raleigh, The English Voyages of the Sixteenth Cen-
tury, 1910, p 28

84Troeltsch, Protestantism and Progress, 1912, pp. 44-52.

252 NOTES

85Schapiro, op at , p 137

88 See citations in Wiskemann, op cit , pp 47-8, and, for a discus-
sion of Luther's social theory, Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der Chnst-
hchen Kirchen, 1012, pp S4Q-93

37 Luther, An den chnsthchcn Add deutscher Nation (1520). m
Werke, vol vi, pp 381 seqq

M Schapiro, op at , p 139

39 Luther, Ermahnnng zum Fneden auf die zwolf Artikcl der Bauer-
schaft in Schwaben (1525), in Werke, vol xvm, p 327

40 Von Kaufshandlung und Wucher, in ibid , vol xv, p 295

41 An den christhchen Adel, in ibid , vol vi, p 466 (quoted by
R H Murray, Erasmus and Luther, 1020, p 230)

42 Von Kaufshandlung und Wucher, in ibid , vol \v, pp 293-4, 312

43 Concerning Christian Liberty, in Wace and Buchheim, Luther's
Primary Works, 1806, pp 256-7

t4 Grosser Sermon vom Wuchet, in Werkc, vol vi, p 49
4ft See note 73 on Chapter I

40 Printed in Neumann, Geschichte des Wucher <> in Deutschland,
Beilage F, pp 618-19

47 Concerning Christian Liberty, in Wace and Buchheim, op cit.,
pp 258-0

48 Von Kaujshandlung und Wucher, in Werke, vol xv, p 302

49 Zwmgli, Von da gotthchen und men^chhchen Gricchtigkeit, oder
von dem gottlichen Ge seize und den burgerhchen, Ge^elzen, printed
in R Christoffel, H Zwmgli, Leben und ausgewahlte Schriften, 1857,
pt ii, pp 3H seqq See aKo Wiskemann, op at, pp 71-4

60 "Quid si igitur ex nepociatione plus lucn percipi possit, quam ex
fundi cuiusvis proventu? Undc vero mercatons lucrum ^ Ex ipmus
inquies, diligentia et mdu&tna" (quoted by Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren
der Chntflichen Kirche, p 707)

51 Bucer, De Regno Chnsti

B2 Ropjer Fcnton, A Treatise of Usune, 1612, p 61

63 Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans by J Allen,
1838, vol 11, p 147 (bk m, ch xxm, par 7)

54 Ibid , vol 11, pp 128-0 (bk m, ch x\i, par 7)

55 Gerrard Wmstanley, A New-Veer's Gift for the Parliament and
Armie, 1650 (Thomason Tracts, Brit Mus , E S87 [6], p 42)

*bThe Works of William Land, DD , ed Wm Scott, vol vi, pt i,
1857, p 21*

57 De Subventtone Pauperum

5S "Quod ad maiores natu spectat, a nobis quotannis repetitur in
spectio cumsque famihac Distiibuimus inter nos urbis reRiones, ut
ordme singulas decunas executere hteat Adest ministro comes unus
ex semoribus lllic novi incola? cxammantur Qui semel recepti sunt,
omittuntur, nisi quod requintur sitne domus pacata et recte com-
posita, num htes cum vicinis, num qua ebnetas, num pisri smt et
ignari ad conciones frequentendas" (quoted by Wiskemann, op cit ,
p. 80 n ) For his condemnation of indiscriminate alms-giving, see
ibid, p 79 n

M De non habendo Pauperum Delectu (1523), and DC Erogatione
Eleemosynarum (1524) See K R Ha^enbach, Johann Oekolampad
und Oswald Myconius. die Reformatoren Baseh, 1859. D. 46.

NOTES ON CHAPTER IT 253

60 Carl Pestalozzi, Hennch Bullmger, Leben und ausgewahlte
Schriften, 1858, pp 50-1, 122-5, 340-2

01 Wiskemann, op. at , pp 70-4

w Quoted by Preserved Smith, The Age of the Reformation, 1921,
p 174

fl< Calvin, Jnst , bk iv, ch xii, par 1

M Printed in Paul Henry, Das Leben Johann Calvins, vol. ii, 1838,
Appx, pp 26-41.

6r> R Chnstoffel, Zwmgli, or the Rise of the Reformation in Switz-
erland, trans by John Cochran, 1858, pp 159-60

''"Printed m Paul Henrv, op cit , vol n, Appx, pp 23-5.

07 E Choisy, L'Etat Chretien Calvmiste a Geneve au temps de
Theodore de Beze, 1902, p 145 I should like to make acknowledg-
ments to this excellent book for most of the matter contained in the
following paragraphs

tiH Paul Henry, op cit , pp 70-5 Other examples arc given by Pre-
served Smith, op cit , pp 170-4, and by F W Kampschulte, Johann
Calvin, seme Kirche und sein Staat in Gcnf, I860 Statistical esti-
mates of the bloodthirstmess of Calvin's regime vary, Smith (p 171)
states that in Geneva, a town of 16,000 inhabitants, 58 persons were
executed and 76 banished in the years 1542-6

"" Knox, quoted by Preserved Smith, op cit , p 174

70 Calvin, Jnst , bk in, ch vn, par 5

71 Choisy, op cit , pp 442-3
''"Ibid, pp tf-W

13 Ibid , pp 180, 117-19
74 Ibid , pp 035, 165-7
7r Ibid , pp 110-21
"'* Ibid, pp 180-04

77 Paul Henry, op cit , vol ii, p 70 n

78 See the description of the Church given in Calvin, Inst., bk. iv,
ch i, par 4 "Quia nunc dc ecclesia visibili dissererc propositum est
discamus vel matns elogio, quam utilis sit nobis ems cogmtio, immo
necessana, quando non alms est in vitam ingressus nisi nos ipsa
concipiat m utero, nisi panat, nisi nos alat STUS uberibus, denique
sub custodia ct gubernatione sua nos tueatur, donee excuti carne
mortali, similes enmus angehs Neque enim prititur nostra infirmitas
a schola nos dimitti, donee toto vitae cursu discipuh fuenmus Adde
quod extra ems gremium nulla est esperanda peccatorum remissio
nee ulla salus "

71) John Quick, Synodicon m Gallm Reformata Or the Arts, Deci-
sions, Dectees and Canons of those famous National Councils of the
Reformed Churches in France, 1602, vol i, p 90

80 Ibid, vol i, p 0 (pirates and fraudulent tiadesmen), pp 25,34,
38, 70, 140 (interest and usury), p 70 (false merchandise and selling
of stretched cloth), p o (reasonable profits), pp 162, 204 (investment
of money for the benefit of the poor), pp 104, 213 (lotteries).

81 The' Buke of Discipline, in Works of John Knox, ed D. Laing,
vol ii, 1848, p 227

82 Scottish History Soc , St Andrews Kirk Session Register, ed.
D H Fleming, 1889-90, vol i, p 309, vol ii, p 822

83 W. B Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England,

254 NOTES

1890, vol i, p. 11 The words are Governor Bradford's.

84 Winthrop's Journal "Hittory of New England'' 1630-49, ed. J. K.
Hosmer, 1908, vol i, pp 134, 325; vol ii, p. 20

MWeeden, op cit , vol i, pp 125, 58

86 Wmthrop, op. cit , vol ii, p 20.

87 J. A Doyle, The English in America, vol ii, 1887, p. 57; the
price of cattle "must not be judged by urgent necessity, but by rea-
sonable profit."

88 Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, 1644, chap,
Iv,

89 Wmthrop, op ctt., vol i, pp 315-18 A similar set of rules as to
the conduct of the Christian in trade are given by Bunyan in The Life
end Death oj Mr Badman, 1905 ed , pp 118-22

80 1 owe this phrase to the excellent book of J. T. Adams, The
Founding of New England

CHAPTER III

1 J. Rossus, Historia Regum Anglioe (ed T Hearne).

*4 Hen. VII, c. 19; 6 Hen VIII, c 5; 7 Hen VIII, c. 1; 25
Hen VIII, c. 13 For the Commission of 1517 see Leadam, The
Domesday of Enclosures

8 For examples see J. S Schapiro, Social Reform and the Refor-
mation, pp 60-1, 65, 67, 70-1

4 More, Utopia, p 32 (Pitt Press ed , 1879) "Noblemen and gen-
tlemen, yea and certeyne abbottes, holy men no doubt . . . leave no
grounde for tillage, thei enclose al into pastures " For a case of
claiming a bondman see Selden Society, vol. xvi, 1903, Select Cases
in the Court of Star Chamber, pp. cxxhi-cxxix, 118-29 (Carter v.
the Abbott of Malmesbury) ; for conversion of copyholds to tenancies
at will, Selden Society, vol xii, 1898, Select Case\ in the Court of
Requests, pp lix-lxv, 64-101 (Kent and other inhabitants of Abbot's
Ripton v. St. John; the change was alleged to have been made m
1471).

5 A. Savine, English Monasteries on the Eve of the Dissolution
(Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History, ed P Vmogradoff,
vol. i, 1909, p. 100), estimates the net temporal income of English
monasteries in 1535 at £100,736, and the net income from all sources
at £136,361. These figures require to be multiplied by at least 12 to
convert them into terms of modern money An estimate of the capital
value which they represent can only be a guess, but it can hardly
have been less (in terms of modern money) than £20,000,000

*For the status and payments of grantees, see the figures of Savine,
printed in H. A. L. Fisher, The Political History of England, 1485-
1547, Appx. ii- the low price paid by peers is particularly striking
The best study is that of S B Liljegren, The Fall oj the Monasteries
and the Social Changes in England leading up to the Great Revolution
(1924), which shows in detail (pp. 18-25) the activities of speculators.

* Star Chamber Proc., Hen. VIII, vol. vi, no. 181, printed in Taw-
ney and Power, Tudor Economic Documentsf vol. i, pp. 19-29

NOTES ON CHAPTER III 255

"Selden Society, Select Cases in the Court of Requests, pp. Iviii-
Ixix, 198-200.

"Quoted by F A Gasquet, Henry the Eighth and the English
Monasteries, 1020, pp 227-8

10 See, e g , The Obedience of a Christian Man (in Tyndale's Doc-
trinal Treatises, Parker Society, 1848), p 231, where the treatment
of the poor by the early Church is cited as an example, and Policies
to reduce this Realme of Englande unto a Prosperous Wealthe and
Estate, 1540 (printed m Tdwney and Power, Tudor Economic Doc-
uments, vol m, pp 311-4?) "Like as we suffered our selfes to be
ignorant of the trewe worshipping of God, even so God kepte from
us the right knowledge how to reforme those inconveniences which
we did see before our eyes to tende unto the utter Desolation of the
Realme But now that the trew worshipping of Code is so

purely and sincerely sett foithe, it is likewise to be trusted that God
will use the kinges majestie and your grace to be also his min-
istres m plucking up by the roots all the cawses and occasions of this
foresaid Decaye and Desolation "

31 Bucer, De Regno Chnsti

}" A F Leach, The Schools of Mediaeval England, 1015, p 331 He
goes on 'The contrasts between one grammar school to every 5,625
people, and that presented by the Schools Inquiry Report m 1864 of
one to every 23,750 people is not to the disadvantage of our

pre-Reformalion ancestors " For details of the Edwardian spoliation,
see the same author's English Schools at the Reformation, 1546-8
(1806)

13 See Acts of the Privy Council, vol ii, pp. 103-5 (1548); in re-
sponse to protests from the members for Lynn and Coventry, the gild
lands of those cities are regranted to them

14 Crowley, The Way to Wealth, in Select Works of Robert Crow-
ley, ed J M Cowper (Early English Text Society, 1872, pp 129-
150)

ir' Crowley, op cit , and Epigrams (in ibid, pp 1-51)
1('Becon, The Jewel of Joy, 1553 "They abhore the names of
Monkes, Friers, Chanons, Nonnes, etc , by their goodes they gredely
gripe And yet where the cloysters kept hospitality, let out their
fermes at a reasonable price, nonshed scholes, brought up youth in
good letters, they do none of all these thynges "

17 Thomas Lever, Sermons, 1550 (English Reprints, ed E. Arber,
1805), p 32 The same charge is repeated in subsequent sermons

18 F W Russell, Kelt's Rebellion in Norfolk, 1859, p 202 For
Somerset's policy and the revolt of the gentry against it, see Tawney,
The Agrarian Problem m the Sixteenth Century, pp 365-70

1MLatimer, Seven Sermons before Edward VI (English Reprints,
ed E Arber, 1805), pp 4-6

20 Pleasure and Pain, in Select Works of Robert Crowley , ed J. M.
Cowper, p 116

" The way to Wealth, in ibid , p 132

22 Lever, op cit , p 130

23 A Prayer for Landlords, from A Book of Private Praver set forth
by Order of King Edward VI

24 Bacon, Of the True Greatness of the Kingdom of Britain.

2S6 NOTES

96 For a discussion of the problem of credit as it affected the peas-
ant and small master, see my introduction to Wilson's Discourse Upon
Usury, 1Q2S, pp 17-30

26 See note 71 on Chapter I

"D'Ewes, Journals, 1682, p 173.

28 Calendar SP D Ehz , vol cclxxxvi, nos 19, 20

29 For examples see S 0 Addy, Church and Manor, 1913, chap xv.
The best account of parish business and organization is given by S L
Ware, The Elizabethan Parish in its Ecclesiastical and Financial As-
pects, 1908

90 Lever, op. cit., p 130 See also Harrison, Thv Description of
Bntamc, 15S7 cd , bk n, chap xviu

81 A Godhe Treatise concerning the Lawful Use of Riches, a trans-
lation by Thos Rogers from the Latin of Nicholas Heming, 1578,
p. 8

32 Sandys, 2nd, 10th, llth, and 12th of Sermons (Parker Society,
1841), Jewel, Works, pt iv, pp 1293-8 (Parker Society, 1850) , Thos
Wilson, A Discourse upon Usury, 1572, Miles Mosse, The Arraign-
ment and Conviction oj Usune, 1W, John Blaxton, The English
Usurer, or Usury Condemned by the Most Learned and Famous
Divines of the Church of England, 1634

83 Heming, op cit , pp 16-17.

"Roger Fenton, A Treatise of Usune, 1612, p 59.

85 Wilson, op cit , 1925, ed p 281

86 Miles Mosse, op cit.

87 SP.D. Ehz, vol Ixxv, no 54 (Printed in Tawney and Power,
Tudor Economic Documents, vol hi, pp 350-70)

"Heming, op cit, p 11

89 Maitland, English Law and the Renaissance, 1901

40 Quoted by Maitland, op cit , pp 49-50

41 Wilson, op cit

42 Jeremy Taylor, Ductor Dubitantium, 1660, bk iii, ch iii, par 30
48 Mosse, op cit., Dedication, p 6

44 E. Cardwell, Synodalla, 1842, p 436

"Cardwell, The Reformation of the Ecclesiastical Laws, 1850, pp.
206, 323

46 The Remains of Archbishop Gnndal, ed Wm Nicholson (Parker
Soc, 1843), p 143

47 See, e g , W P M Kennedy, Elizabethan Episcopal Administra-
tion, 1924, vol iii, p 180 (Archdeacon Mullms' Articles for the
Archdeaconry of London (1585) "Item, whether you do know that
within your parish there is (or are) any person or persons notoriously
known or suspected by probable tokens or common fame to be an
usurer; or doth offend by any colour or means directly or indirectly
in the same"), and pp. 184, 233; Wilkins, Concilia, vol iv, pp 319,
337, 416.

48 Cardwell, Synodalia, vol i, pp. 144, 308 , Wilkins, Concilia, vol.
iv, p. 509.

49 Ware, op cit. (see note 29 above), quotes several examples. See
also ArchfKologia Cantiana, vol. xxv, 1902, pp. 27, 48 (Visitations of
the Archdeacon of Canterbury).

NOTES ON CHAPTER III 257

5" Hist MSS Com, 13th Report, 1892, Appx , pt iv, pp 333-4
(M S S of the Borough of Hereford}

0] W. H Hale, A Scries of Precedents and Proceedings in Criminal
Causes, 1847, p 166

32 Yorkshire Arth Journal, vol xvm, 1895, p 331

63 Commi^ary of London Correction Books, 1618-1625 (H 184, pp.
164, 1«2) I am indebted to Mr Fmcham of Somerset House (where
the books are kept) for kindly calling my attention to these cases.
The shorter of them (p 192) runs as follows

Sancti Botolphi , Detected for an usurer that takcth above the
extra Aldersgate 1 rate of x11 in the 100lJ and above the rate of 2i.
Thomas Witham ' m the pound for money by him lent for a yeare,

at the signe of f or more than after that rate for a lesse tyme

the Unicorne * ex fama prout in rotula Quo die comparuit, etc.

9wo Man 1620 coram domino official! principal! etc et in eius
camera etc comparuit dictus Witham et ei objecto ut supra allegavit
that he is seldom at home himselfe but leaves his man to deale in the
business of his shop, and yf any fault be committed he saith the fault
is in his man and not in himselfe, and he saycth he will give charge
and take care that no oppression shall be made nor offence committed
this way hereafter, humbly praying the judge for favour to be dis-
missed, unde clommus monuit eum that thereafter neither by himselfe
nor his servant he offende in the lyke nor suffer any such oppression
to be committed, et cum hac momtione eum dimisit

^SPD Ehz, vol Ixxv, no S4

56 For an account of these expedients see my introduction to Wil-
son's Discourse upon Usury, 1925, pp 123-8

5l> Richard Hooker, The Law* of Ecclesiastical Policy, bk vm, chap,
i, par 5

07 Acts of the Privy Council, vol xxvn, 1W, p 129

'*The Stiff key Papers (ed H W Saunders, Roval Historical
Society, Camden Third Series, vol xxvi, 1915), p 140

511 Quoted by E M Leonard, The Early History of English Poor
Rehef, 1900, p 148

60 For an account of the treatment of exchange business under
Elizabeth, see Wilson, op at , Introduction, pp 146-54

(>1 Foi references sec ibid , pp 164- S, and Les Repoites del Cases
in Camera Stellata, 15Q3-160Q, ed W P Baildon, 1894, pp 235-7.
The Utter book contain^ several instances of intervention by the
Star Chamber in cases of engrossing of corn (pp 71, 76-7, 78-9, 91)
and of enclosure and depopulation (pp 49-52, 164-5, 192-3, 247,
346-7)

<!2 A Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England, ed.
E Lamond, 1893, p 14

*"The Work*, of William Laud, D D , ed Wm Scott, vol i,1847,p 6.

«>lbid, p 64

("lbid, pp 89, 138

Mlbid, p 167

"Ibid, pp 28-29

68 Conner, Common Land and Enclosure, 1912, pp 166-7 For
the activity of the Government from 1629 to 1640, see Tawney, The

258 NOTES

Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, pp 376, 301, and E M.
Leonard, The Inclosnre of Common Fields in the Seventeenth Cen-
tury, in Trans Royal Htrt Soc , N S , vol MX, pp 101 seqq

** Letter to Dr 'Gilbert Sheldon Warden of All Souls (in Laud's
Works, vol vi, pt n, p 520) "One thing more T must tell you,
that, though I did vou this favour, to make stay of the hearing till
your return, yet for the business itself, I can show you none , partly
because I am a great hater of depopulations in any kind, as being
one of the greatest mischiefs in this kingdom, and of very ill example
from a college, or college tenant", Clarendon, History of the Re-
bellion, bk i, par 204

70 5? D Chas I, vol ccccxcix, no 10 (printed in Tawney, The
Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, pp 420-1) , and Lords'
Journals, vol vi, p 4686 (March 13, 1643-4), Articles against Laud
"Then Mr Talbot upon oath deposed how the Archbishop did oppose
the law in the business of mclosures and depopulations, how, when
the law was desired to be pleaded for the right of land, he bid them
'Go plead law in inferior Courts, they should not plead it before
him', and that the Archbishop did fine him for that business two
hundred pounds for using the property of his freehold, and would
not suffer the law to be pleaded "

"Leonard, The Early History of English Pooi Relief, pp 150-64;
Unwin, Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries, 1904, pp 142-7

74 R R Reid, The Km%'\ Council in the North, 1921, pp 412, 413 n

T8 Camden Soc , N S , vol xxxix, 1886, Cases tn the Courts of Star
Chamber and Hiqh Commission, ed S R Gardiner, p 46 For an-
other case of engrossing of corn, see ibid , pp 82-9

"Tawney, The Assessment of Wages in England by the Justices of
the Peace, in Vierteljahischiift fur Sozial- und Wirthschaftsgeschtchte,
Bd xi, 1913, pp 551-4, Leonard, op at, p 157

78 The Works of William Laud, ed Wm Scott, vol vi, 18^7, pt i,
p. 191 (Answer to Lord Save and Sele's speech upon the Bill about
Bishops' Powers in Civil Affairs and Courts of Judicature )

™Ibid, vol i, pp 5-6

"Harrington, Works, 1700 ed , pp 69 (Oceana) and 388-9 (The
Art of Law- giving)

78 G. Malynes, Lex Mercatoria, 1622 The same simile had been
used much earlier in A Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm
of England, ed E. Lamond, p 98

TeD'Ewes, Journals, p 674, and 39 Ehz , c 2

80 For criticisms of price control see Tawney and Power, Tudor
Economic Documents, vol in, pp 339-41, and vol. li, p 188, and
Stiffkey Papers (see note 58 above), pp 130-40

81 H Ellis, Original Letters, 2nd series, vol ii, 1827, letter clxxxn,
and J. W Burgon, The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Gresham,
1839, vol ii, p 343

"Wilson, op cit (see note 55 above), p 249.

M Commons' Journals, May 21, 1604, vol. i, p 218

84 13 Eliz., c. 8, repealing 5 and 6 Ed VI, c. 20; D'Ewes, Journals,
pp. 171-4.

NOTES ON CHAPTER IV 2S9

85 Owen and Blakeway, Historv of Shrewsbury, 1825, vol. ii, pp,
364n ,412

86 Hist MSS. Com , Report on MSS in various Collections, vol. i,
1901, p 46 (MSS of Corporation of Burford)

ST Wilson, op cit (see note 55 above), p 233

88 Coke, Institutes, pt 11, 17Q7, pp 001 seqq (Certain articles oj
abuses which are desiied to be reformed in granting oj prohibitions,
exhibited by Richard Bancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury.)

s" Thomas Ridley, A View of the Civile and Ecclesiastical Law,
and when in the Practice oj them zs t>treitened and may be relieved
wiihm this Land, 1607, Dedication, p 3

"°W Hunlley, A Breviate of the Prelates' intolerable Usurpation,
16n, pp 183-4 The case referred to is that of Hmde, alleged to have
been heard Mich 18 and 1Q Eh/ For the controversy over prohibi-
tions, see R G Usher, The Rne and ball oj the High Commission,
1013, pp 180 seqq

91D'Ewes, Journals, pp 171, 173

"See e g , Surtees Society, vol xxxiv, 18S8, The Acts oj the High
Commission Court within the Diocese oj Durham, Preface, which
shows that between 1626 and 1630 cases of contempt of the ordinary
ecclesiastical jurisdiction ran into hundreds

"JPenn, No Cross, No Crown, pt i, ch xu, par 8

M Sanderson, De Obligatwne Conscientice, 1666, Taylor, The Rule
and Exercises of Holy Living, 1650, chap m, sect iii (Of Negotiation
or Civil Contracts, Rules and Measures of Justice m Bargaining).

05Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, ed F B Kaye, 1924, pp. 193,
194 Similar sentiments with regard to the necessity of poverty were
expressed later by the Rev J Townsend, in his Dissertation on the
Poor Laws (1785), and by Patrick Colquhoun m his Treatise on the
Wealth and Resources of the Rritish Empire (1814) Like Mandeville,
both these writers argue that poverty is essential to the prosperity,
and, indeed, to the very existence of civilization For a full collection
of citations to the same effect from eighteenth-century writers, see
E E Furni^s, The Position oj the Laborer in a System of National-
ism, 1Q20, chaps iv-vi

B($ The Whole Duty of Man, laid down in a plain and familiar Way
for the Use of All, 1658

CHAPTER IV

1 Tucker, A Brief Essay on the Advantages and Disadvantages
which respectively attend France and Great Britain with regard to
Trade, 1750, p 33 The best account of Tucker, most of whose works
are scarce, is given by W E Clark, Josiah Tucker, Economist (Stud-
ies in History, Economics and Public Law, Columbia University,
vol xix, 1903-5).

3 Rehquice Baxterianae: or Mr Richard Baxter's Narrative of the
most memorable Passages of his Life and Times, 1696, p. 5.

* Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress

* The Life of the Duke of Newcastle, by Margaret, Duchess of New*
castle (Everyman ed., 1915, p 153)

B Baxter, op. at., p. 31.

260 NOTES

8 Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress.

* Baxter, op at , p 89

8 Thomas Fuller, The Holy and Profane States, 1884 ed , p 122

"Quoted S Seyer, Memoirs of Bristol, vol li, 1823, p 314

10 R. G Usher, The Reconstruction oj the English Church, vol i,
1910, pp 249-50

"Baxter, op cit , p 30

M An orderly and plaine Narration of the Beginnings and Causes
of this Warre, 1644, p 4 (Brit Mus Thomason Tiacts, E 54 HI)
I owe this reference to the kindness of Father Paschal Larkin

"Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, bk vi, par 271.

"Parker, Discourse of Ecclesiastical Pohtie, 1670, Preface, p xxxix

"The Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon, written by himself, 1827
ed , vol in, p 101

18 D C A Agnew, Protestant Enles from Ftance, 1886, vol i, pp
20-1 In 1640 the Root and Branch Petition included, among the evils
due to the Bishops, "the discouragement and destruction oi all good
subjects, of whom are multitudes, both clothiers, merchants and
others, who, being deprived of their ministers, and overburthcned
with these pressures, have departed the kingdom to Holland and
other parts, and have drawn with them a gieat manufacture of
cloth and trading out of the land into other plates where they re-
side, whereby wool, the great staple of the kingdom, is become of
small value, and vends not, trading is decayed, many poor people
want work, seamen lose employment, and the whole land is much
impoverished" (S R Gardiner, Constitutional Documents of the
Puritan Revolution, 1628-60 |188Q|, p 7*) For instances of the com-
paratively liberal treatment of alien immigrants under Elizabeth, see
Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Documents, vol i, section vi,
nos 3, 4, 11 (2), 15, and Cunningham, Growth oj English Industry
and Commerce, Modern Times, 1921, pt i, pp 7°-84

™ Toryism and Trade can never agree, 1713, p 12 The tract is
wrongly ascribed to Davenant by H Levy, Economic Liberalism,
1913, p 12.

18 See, e g , G Martin, La Grande Industrie sous le regne de Louis
XIV, 1899, chap xvu, where the reports of several mtendants are
quoted, and Levacseur, Hist one du commerce dc la Fiance, 1911,
vol i, p 421

19 A Letter from a Gentleman in the City to a Gentleman in the>
Country about the Odiousness of Persecution, 1677, p 20

20 Sir Wm Temple, Observations upon the United Provinces oj the
Netherlands, chap v, vi

21 The True Interest and Political Maxims of the Republick of Hol-
land and West-Fnesland, 1702, pt i, chap xiv

2" Petty, Political Arithmetic, 1690, pp 25-6

23 The Present Interest of England stated, by a Lover of his King
and Country, 1671 I am indebted to Mr A P Wadsworth for calling
my attention to the passage quoted in the text The same point is put
more specifically by Lawrence Braddon "The superstition of their
religion obligeth France to keep (at least) fifty Holy days more than
we are obliged to keep; and every such day wherein no work is done
is one hundred and twenty thousand pounds loss to the deluded

NOTES ON CHAPTER IV 261

people" (Abstract of the Draft of a Bill for relieving, reforming and
employing the Poor, 1717). See also Defoe, in his Enquiry into Occa-
sional Conformity, 1702, pp. 18-19. "We wonder, gentlemen, you will
accept our money on your deficient funds, our stocks to help carry
on your wars, our loans and credits to your victualling office and
navv office If you would go on to distinguish us, get a law made we
shall buy no lands, that we may not be freeholders, and see if you
could find money to buy us out Transplant us into towns and bodies,
and let us trade by our selves, let us card, spin, knit, weave and work
with and for one another, and see how you'll maintain your own poor
without us Let us fraight our ships apart, keep our money out of
your Bank, accept none of our bills, and separate your selves as
absolutely from us in civil matters, as we do from you in religious,
and see how you can go on without us "
24 Swift, Examiner

" Bolmsbroke, Letter to Sir Wm Windham, 1753, p 21
20 Reliquiae Baxtenannce (see note 2), p 04 He goes on "The gen-
erality of the Master Workmen [i e , employers] lived but a little
better than their journeymen (from hand to mouth), but only that
they laboured not altogether so hard "

27 Voltaire, Lettres Philosophiques, no x, and Montesquieu, Esprit
des Lois, xix, 27, and xx, 22 See also the remarks to the same effect
in D'Argenson, Considerations sur le Gouvernement de la France,
1765

28 Brief Survey of the Growth of Usury in England, 1673.
"Marston, Eastward Hoi, act 1, sc i

30 Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, bk i, par 163.

81 Petty, Political Arithmetic, 16QO, p 23

88 Max Weber, Die protestanttsche Ethik und der Geist des Kapi-
talismus, first published in the ArcJmv fur Sozialwissenschajt und So-
zmlpohtik Statistik, vols xx, xxi, and since reprinted in vol i of his
Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Rehgionssozwlogie, 1920, Troeltsch, Die
Soziallehren der Chnstlichen Kirchen and Protestantism ond Pt ogress,
1012 , Schulze-Gaevernitz, Bnttscher Imperialisms 'und Englischer
Freihandel, 1906 , Cunningham, Christianity and Economic Science,
1914, chap v

Weber's essay gave rise to much discussion in Germany Its main
thesis — that Calvinism, and in particular English Puritanism, from
which nearly all his illustrations are drawn, played a part of pre-
ponderant importance in creating moral and political conditions favor-
able to the growth of capitalist enterprise — appears to be accepted by
Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der Chnstlichen Ktrchen, pp 70-4 seqq. It
is submitted to a critical analysis by Brentano (Die Anfange des mo-
dernen Kapitahsmus, 1916, pp 117-57), who dissents from many of
Weber's conclusions Weber's essay is certainly one of the most fruit-
ful examinations of the relations between religion and social theory
which has appeared, and I desire to acknowledge my indebtedness
to it, in particular with reference to its discussion of the economic
application given by some Puritan writers to the idea expressed by
the word "calling" At the same time, there are several points on
which Weber's arguments appear to me to be one-sided and over*

262 NOTES

strained, and on which Brentano's criticisms of it seem to me to
be sound

Thus (i), as was perhaps inevitable m an essay dealing with eco-
nomic and social thought, as distinct from changes in economic and
social organization, Weber seems to me to explain by reference to
moral and intellectual influences developments which have their
principal explanation in another region altogether There was plenty
of the "capitalist spirit" in fifteenth-century Venice and Florence, or
in south Germany and Flanders, for the simple reason that these areas
were the greatest commercial and financial centers of the age, though
all were, at least nominally, Catholic The development of capitalism
in Holland and England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
was due, not to the fact that they were Protestant powers, but to
large economic movements, in particular the Discoveries and the re-
sults which flowed from them Of course material and psychological
changes went together, and of course the second reacted on the first
But it seems a little artificial to talk as though capitalist enterprise
could not appear till religious changes had produced a capitalist
spirit It would be equally true and equally one-sided, to say that
the religious changes were purely the result of economic movements

(n) Weber ignores, or at least touches too lightly on, intellectual
movements, which were favorable to the growth of business enter-
prise and to an individualist attitude towards economic relations, but
which had little to do with religion The political thought of the
Renaissance was one, as Brentano points out, Machiavelli was at
least as powerful a solvent of traditional ethical restraints as Calvin
The speculations of business men and economists on mone\, prices
and the foreign exchanges were a second Both contributed to the
temper of single-minded concentration on pecuniary gain, which
Weber understands by the capitalist spirit

(iii) He appears greatly to over-simplify Calvinism itself In the
first place, he apparently ascribes to the English Puritans of the sev-
enteenth century the conception of social ethics held by Calvin and
his immediate followers In the second place, he speaks as though all
English Puritans m the seventeenth century held much the same view
of social duties and expediency Both suggestions are misleading On
the one hand, the Calvmists of the sixteenth century (including Eng-
lish Puritans) were believers in a rigorous movement m its later
phases would have horrified them The really significant question is
that of the causes of the change from one standpoint to the other,
a question which Weber appears to ignore On the other hand, there
were within seventeenth-century Puritanism a variety of elements,
which held widely different views as to social policy As Cromwell
discovered, there was no formula which would gather Puritan aristo-
crats and Levellers, landowners and Diggeis, merchants and artisans,
buff-coat and his general, into the fold of a single social theory The
issue between divergent doctrines was fought out within the Puritan
movement itself Some won , others lost

Both "the capitalist spirit'' and "Protestant ethics," therefore, were
a good deal more complex than Weber seems to imply What is true
and valuable in his essay is his insistence that the commercial classes
in seventeenth-century England were the standard-bearers of a par-

NOTES ON CHAPTER IV 263

ticular conception of social expediency, which was markedly different
from that of the more conservative elements in society — 'the peasants,
the craftsmen, and many landed gentry — and that that conception
found expression in religion, in politics, and, not least, in social and
economic conduct and policy.

33 Cunningham, The Moial Witness of the Church on the Invest-
ment oj Money and the Use of Wealth, 1009, p 25

a* Knox, The Buke of Discipline, in Works, ed D Lamg, vol. ii,
1848, pp. 183 seqq.; Thos Cartwright, A Directory of Church Gov-
ernment (printed in D. Neal, History of the Puutan\, 1822, vol. v,
Appx iv) , W Travers, A Full and Plain Declaration oj hi clesiasttcai
Discipline, 1574, J Udall, A Demonstration of the Trurth of that
Discipline which Chnste hath prescribed in his Worde for the Gov-
ernment of his Church, 1589, Bancroft, Dangetou* Positions and Pro-
ceedmgs Published and practiced within this Hand of Brytaine under
Pretence of Reformation and for the Prc\byte<ia t Dtsctpune, 15Q3
(part reprinted in R G Usher, The Presbyterian Movement in the
Reign oj Queen Elizabeth, as illustrated by the Minute book oj the
Dedham Claris, 1005).

J0 Cartwnght, op. at.

36 Usher, op cit , p 1

37 Ibid , pp 14-15, for Bancroft's account of the procedure

w Quoted from Bailhe's Letters by W A Shaw, A History of the
English Church during the Ciml Wars and under the Commonwealth,
1QOO, vol i, p. 128

3<t Shaw, op cit., vol. ii, chap m (The Presbyterian System, 1646-
60) For the practical working of Presbyterian discipline, see Chet-
ham Society, vols xx, xxu, xxiv, Minutes of the Manchester Classis,
and vols xxxvi, xli, Minutes oj the bury Classic

40 See Chap III, p. 142.

4 ' Puritan Manifestoes, p 1 20, quoted by H G Wood, The Influ-
ence of the Reformation on Ideas concerning Wealth and Property, in
Property, its Rights and Duties, 1911, p 142 Mr Wood's essay con-
tains an excellent discussion of the whole subject, and I should like
here to acknowledge rm obligations to it For the views of Knew-
stub, Smith, and Baro, see the quotations from them printed by
Haweis, Sketches of the Reformation, 1844, pp 237-40, 243-6. It
should be noted that Baro, while condemning those who, "sitting
idle at home, make merchandise only of their money, by giving it
out in this sort to needy persons without having any regard of

his commodity to whomc they give it, but only of their own gain/'
nevertheless admitted that interest was not always to be condemned.
See also Thos Fuller, History of the University of Cambridge., ed. M
Pnckett and T Wright, 1840, pp 275-6, 288-0, and Cunningham,
Growth of English Industry and Commerce, Modern Times, 1921
ed , pt i, pp 157-8.

42 New Shakespeare Society, Series vi, no 6, 1877-9, Phillip Stubbes's
Anatomy of the Abuses in England, ed F J Furnivall, pp 115-16,

43 W Ames, De Conscientia et ems iure vel casihus hbri quinque,
bk v, chaps xlui, Ixiv Ames (1576-1633) was educated at Christ's
College, Cambridge, tried to settle at Colchester, but was forbidden
to preach by the Bishop of London, went to Leyden about 1610,

264 NOTES

Was appointed to the theological chair at Franeker in 1622, where he
remained for ten years, and died at Rotterdam

44 E.g , Stubbcs, op at ; Richard Capel, Temptations, their Nature,
Danger, Cure, 1633, John Moore, The Ciymg Sin of hngland of not
coring for the Poor, wherein Inclosure, viz such as doth unpeople
Townes, and uncorn Fields, is arraigned, convided and condemned,
1653

46 J 0 Holhwell, The Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir
Simonds D'hive\, 1845, vol i, pp 206-10, 322, 354, vol n, pp %,
153-4

4(5 Usher, op cil (sec note 34 above), pp 32, 5% 70, Qo_ioo
47 Sept 26, 16-J5, it is resolved "that it shall be in the power of the
eldership to suspend from the sacrament of the Lord's supper any
person that shall be legalh attainted of Barratrv, loigerv, Extortion,
Perjury, or Bribery" (( ommons' Journals, vol iv, p 200)

45 Chetham Society, Minuter of the Bury Presbyterian Classis,
1647-57, pt i, pp 32-3 The Cambridge dassis (ibid , pt n, pp 106-7)
decided in 1657 that the oidmance of Pailiament of August 20, 1648
Should be taken as the rule of the classis in the matter of scandal
The various ^candals mentioned in the ordinance included extortion,
and the cla^is decided that "no person LiwlulK convicted ot any of
the foresaid scandalls bee admitted to the Lord's supper without
signification of sincere repentance," but it appears (p 108) to have
been mainly interested in witches, wizards, and fortune-tellers

49 Hut MSS Comm , Repoit on MSS m various Collections, vol
i, 1901, p 132

00 Quoted bv F J Powicke, A Life of the Reverend Richard
Baxter, 1024, p 02

"Selections irom these parts of The Christian Dirtriorv which
bear on social ethics are printed by Jeannette Tawne\, Chapters from
Richard Barter's Christian Directory, 1025, in which most of the
passages quoted in the text will be found
B<* Reliqum1 Baxteriano? (see note 2), p I

83 Life and Death of Mr. Badman (Cambridge Knrl^h Classics,
1Q05), pp 116-25, where Bunyan discusses at length the ethics of
prices

64 Carlyle, Cromwell'** Letters and Speeches, Letter n
"See on these points Weber, op at. (note 32 above), p 04, whose
mam conclusions 1 paraphrase

^Milton, A Defence of the People of England (1602 ed), p xvii

67 See, eg, Thos Wilson, A Discourse upon U\ury, Preface, 1025

ed , p 178 'There bee two sortes of men that are al waves to bee

looked upon very narroly, the one is the dissembling gospeller, and

the other is the wilfull and indurate papiste The first under colour

of religion overthroweth all religion, and bearing good men in hande

that he loveth playnesse, useth covertelie all deceypte that mave bee,

and for pryvate gayne undoeth the common welfaie ot man And

touching thys smne of usune, none doe more openlv offende in thys

behalfe than do these counterfeite professours of thys pure religion "

MFenton, A Treatise of Uwrie, 1612, pp 60-1

60 Brief Survey of the Growth of Usury in England, 1673

*S. Richardson, The Cause of the Poor Pleaded, 1653, Thoma&on

NOTES ON CHAPTER IV 26S

Tracts, E 703 (9), p 14 For other references, see note 72 below.
For extortionate prices, see Thomason Tracts, E 390 (6), The Worth
of a Penny, or a Caution to keep Money, 1647 I am indebted for
this and subsequent references to the Thomason Tracts to Miss P.
James

61 Hooker, Preface to The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Everyman
ed , 1007, vol i, p 128

"'Wilson, op at, p 250

fci Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchmson, written by his Widow
Lucy, Everyman ed , 1008, pp 64-5

04 See the references given in note 66

*'The Earl of Sti afforded Letter and Despatches, by William
Knowler, DD, 1739 vol 11, p 138

0(1 No attempt has been made in the text to do more than refer to
the points on which the economic interests and outlook of the com-
mercial and propertied classes brought them into collision with the
monarchy, and only the most obvious sources of mlormation are
mentioned here For patents and monopolies, including the hated soap
monopoly, see G Unwin, The Gilds and Companies of London, 1908,
chap xvn, and W ll\de Price, The Engh\h Patents of Monopoly,
1006, chap xi, and passim For the control of exchange business,
Cambium Regis, or the Office of his Majesties Exchange Royall, de-
claring and justifying his Majesties Right and the Convenience
thereof, 1628, and Ruding, Annals of the Coinage, 1810, vol iv, pp.
201-10 For the punishment of speculation by the Star Chamber, and
ior projects of public granaries, Camden Society, N S , vol xxxix,
1886, Reports of Cases in the Courts of Star Chamber and High
Commission, ed S R Gai diner, pp 43 seqq , 82 seqq , and NSB.
Onis, The Evolution of the English Corn Market, 191^ pp 246-50.
For the control of the textile industry and the reaction against it,
H Heaton, The Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industries, 1920,
chaps iv, vn, Kate E Barford, The West of England Cloth Indus-
try A seventeenth-century Experiment in State Control, in the
Wiltshire Aichaplogical and Natural History Magazine, Dec, 1924, pp.
531-42, R R Reid, The King's Council 'in the Noith, 1921, pt iv,
chap 11, Victoria County History, Suffolk, vol 11, pp 263-8 For the
intervention of the Privy Council to raise the wages of textile work-
ers and to protect craftsmen, Tawney, The Assessment of Wages in
England by the Justices of the Peace, in the Vierteljahrschrift fur
Sozial- und Wuthschaftzgeschichte, Bd xi, ion, pp 307-37, 533-64;
Leonard, The Early History of English Poor Relief, pp 160-3; Vic-
toria County History, Suffolk, vol n, pp 268-9, and Unwin, Indus-
trial Organization in thv Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 1904,
pp 142-7 For the Depopulation Commissions, Tawney, The Agrarian
Problem m the Sixteenth Century, pp 376, 391 For the squeezing
of money from the East India Company and the infringement of its
Charter,' Shafa 'at Ahmad Khan, The East India Trade m the XVIlth
Century, 1023, pp 60-73 For the colonial interests of Puritan mem-
bers, A P Newton, Th( Colonising Attivities of the English Puritans,
1914, and C E Wade, John Pym, 1912.

07 E Laspeyres, Geschichte der Volkswirthschajtlichen Anschauun-
gen der Niederlander und ihrer Literatur zur Zeit der Republik,

266 NOTES

1863, pp 256-70 An idea of the points at issue can be gathered from
the exhaustive (and unreadable) work of Salmasms, De Modo
Vsurarum, 1639

68 John Quick, Synodicon in Gallia Reformata, 1692, vol i, p 99.

w For the change of sentiment in America, see Troeltsch, Protes-
tantism and Progress, pp. 117-27; for Franklin, Memoirs of the Life
and Writings of Benjamin Franklin, and Sombart, The Quintessence
Of Capitalism, 1915, pp. 116-21

70 Rev. Robert Woodrow (quoted by Sombart, op. cit , p 149).

71 John Cooke, Unum Necessanum or the Poore Man's Case
(1648), which contains a plea for the regulation of prices and the
establishment of Monts de Picte

"For the scandal caused to the Protestant religion by its alleged
condonation of covetousness, see T Watson, A Plea for Alms, 1658
(Thomason Tracts, E 2125), pp 21, 33-4 "The Church of Rome
layes upon us this aspersion that we are against good workes
I am sorry that any who go for honest men should be brought into
the mdightment, I mean that any professors should be impeached as
guilty of this sinne of covctousnesse and unmercifalne^se . . I tell
you these devout misers are the reproach of Christianity ... I may
say of penurious votaries, they have the wings of profession by which
they seem to fly to heaven, but the feet of beasts, walking on the
earth and even licking the dust . Oh, take heed, that, seeing your
religion will not destroy your covetousnesse, at last your covetous-
nesse does not destroy your religion " See also Sir Balthazar Gerbier,
A New Year's Result in favour of the Poore, 1651 (Thomason Tracts,
E. 651 [14], p 4 "If the Papists did rely as much on faith as the
reformed professors of the Gospel (according to our English tenets)
doe, or that the reformed professors did so much practice charity as
the Papists doe?"

"S. Richardson, op. at (see note 60 above), pp 7-8, 10

T4The first person to emphasize the way in which the idea of a
* calling" was used as an argument for the economic virtues was
Weber (see note 32 above), to whose conclusions I am largely in-
debted for the following paragraphs

" Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress

"Steele, op. at. (see note 76 above)

Richard Steele, The Tradesman's Calling, being a Discourse con-
cerning the Nature, Necessity, Choice, etc, of a Calling in general,
1684, pp 1, 4

" Ibid., pp. 21-2.

78 Ibid, p 35

19 Baxter, Christian Directory, 1678 ed , vol i, p 3366.

80 Thomas Adams (quoted Weber, op. cit , p 96 n )

$1 Matthew Henry, The Worth of the Soul (quoted ibid., p 168 n.).

"Baxter, op cit, vol i, p. Ilia.

"Steele, op. cit, p. 20

84 Baxter, op. at» vol i, pp. 3786, 1086, vol. iv, p. 2530.

NOTES ON CHAPTER IV 267

8G Navigation Spiritualized: or a New Compass for Seamen, con-
sisting of xxxn Points

I Pleasant Observation*
of v Profitable Applications and
I Serious Reflections

All concluded with so many spiritual poems Whereunto is now added,

i A sober conversation of the sm of drunkenness.
n The Harlot's face in the script lire -glass, etc

Being an essay towards then much dewed Reformation from the hor-
rible and detestable sins of Drunkenness, Swearing, Uncleanness, For-
get fulness of Meicies, Violation of Promises, and Atheistical Contempt
of Death 1682

The author of this cheerful work wa« a Devonshire minister, John
Flavell, who also wrote Husbandry Spiritualized, or the Heavenly
Use of Earthly Things, 1660 In him, as in Steele, the Chadband
touch is unmistakable The Religious Weaver, apparently by one
Fawcett, I have not been able to trace

80 Steele, op cit (see note 76 above)

87 Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress

*s David Jones, A Farewell Sermon at St Mary Woolnoth's, 1692

hM Nicholas Barbon, A Discourse of Trade, 1600, ed by Professor
John H Hollander (A Reprint of Economic Tracts, Series 11, no I).

uo The words of a member of the Long Parliament, quoted by
C H Fnth, Oliver Cromwell, 1002, p 31 ^

01 The Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 1827 ed , vol 11, p 2^5.
"The merchants took much delight to enlarge themselves upon this
argument he , the advantages of war], and shortly after to discourse
'of the infinite benefit that would accrue from a barefaced war against
the Dutch, how easily they might be subdued and the trade carried
by the English ' " According to Clarendon, who despised the mer-
chants and hated the whole business, it was almost a classical example
of a commercial war, carciully stage-managed in all its details, from
the directorship which the Royal African Company gave to the Duke
of York down to the inevitable "incident" with which hostilities
began

92 Ibid , vol in, pp 7-9

IH Sir Dudley North, Discourses upon Trade, 1691, Preface

M Petty, Political Arithmetic, Preface

nr> Chamberlayne, Anglioz Notitia (quoted P E Dove, Account of
Andrew Yarranton, 1854, p 82 n).

f'° Roger North, The Lives of the Norths (1826 ed ), vol in, p 103;
T Watson, A Plea for Alms (Thomason Tracts, E 2125), p. 33;
Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, 2nd part, 1682, p 9, where Sir
Robert Clayton, Lord Mayor 1670-80, and Member of Parliament for
the City 1679-81 and again from 1689, appears as "extorting Ish-
ban " He was a scrivener who had made his money by usury

fl7 John Fawke, Sir William Thompson, William Love and John
Jones

98 Charles King (The British Merchant, 1721, vol. i, p 181) gives

268 NOTES

the following persons as signatories of an analysis of the trade be-
tween England and France in 1674 * Patience Ward, Thomas Papillon,
James Houblon, William Bellamy, Michael Godfrey, George Tonano,
John Houblon, John Houghe, John Mervin, Peter Paravicine, John
Dubois, Benj. Godfrey, Edm Harrison, Benj. Delaune The number
of foreign names is remarkable

MFor Dutch capital in London, see Hist MSS Comm , 8th Report,
1881, p. 134 (proceedings of the Committee on the decay of trade,
1669) ; with regard to investment of foreign capital in England, it was
stated that "Alderman Bucknell had above £100,000 in his hands,
Mr. Meynell above £30,000, Mr. Vandeput at one time £60,000, Mr.
Dencost always near £200,000 of Dutch money, lent to merchants
at 7, 6, and 5 per cent "

100 The Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon, vol 11, pp 289-93, and
vol. iii, pp 4-7; and John Beresford, The Godfather of Downing
Street, 1925

101 S. Bannister, William Paterson, the Merchant-Statesman, and
founder of the Bank of England His Life and Trials, 1858

102 A. Yarranton, England's Improvement, 1677

108 The Complete English Tradesman (1726) belongs to the same
genus as the book of Steele (see abo\e, pp 244-6), but it has reduced
Christianity to even more innocuous proportions see Letter xvu (Of
Honesty in Dealing)

104 T. S. Ashton, Iron and Steel in the Industrial Revolution, 1Q24,
pp. 211-26 Mr A P Wadsworth has shown that the leading Lan-
cashire colthiers were often Nonconformists (History of the Roch-
dale Woollen Trade, in Trans Rochdale Lit and Sci Soc , vol xv,
1925).

100 Quoted F J Powicke, Life of Baxter, 1924, p 158

106 Dicey, Law and Public Opinion m England, 1005, pp 400-1

107 The Humble Petition of Thousands of well-iff<>cted Persons in-
habiting the City of London, Westminster, th*c Borough of South-
wark, Hamlets, and Places adjacent (Bodleian Pamphlets, The Level-
lers' Petitions, c 15, 3 Line ) See also G P Gooch, English Demo-
cratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century, 1808

J<*Camden Society, The Clarke Papers, ed C H Firth, 1891-4, vol
ii, pp. 217-21 (letter from Winstanley to Fairfax and the Council of
War, Dec 8, 1649)

109 Records of the Borough of Leicester, 1603-88, ed Helen Stocks,
1923, pp 370, 414, 428-30

110 John Moore, op cit (see note 44, above), p 13 See also E C K
Conner, Common Land and Enclosure, 1912, pp 5^-5

111 Camden Society, The Clarke Papers, vol i, pp 299 seqq , Ixvii
seqq

112 The Diary of Thomas Burton, ed J T Rutt, 1828, vol i, pp
175-6. A letter from Whalley, referring to agitations against enclosure
in Warwickshire, Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire and Leicestershire,
will be found in Thurloe, State Papers, vol iv, p 686

118 Joseph Lee, A Vindication of a Regulated Enclosure, 1656, p 9.

114 Aquinas, Summa Theol , 2a 2l«, Q xxxn, art v

118 Dives et Pauper, 1493, Prol , chap, vn, cf. Pecock, The Represser

NOTES ON CHAPTER IV 269

of over-much Blaming of the Clergy, pt. iii, chap iv, pp. 296-7. For
an excellent account of the medieval attitude towards the poor, see
B. L Manning, The People's Faith in the Time of Wycltf, 1919, chap. x.

116 A Lyke-wake Dirge, printed by W. Allmgham, The Ballad Book,
1007, no xxxi

"' Latimer, The fifth Sermon on the Lord's Prayer (in Sermons,
Everyman ed , p ^36) Cf Tyndale, The Parable of the Wicked
Mammon (in Doctrinal Treaties of William Tyndale, Parker Society,
1848, p. 97) "If thy brother or neighbour therefore need, and thou
have to help him, and vet showest not mercy, but withdrawest thy
hands from him, then robbest thou him of his own, and art a thief."

118 Christopher Harvey, The Overseer of the Poor (in G. Gilfillan,
The Poetical Work1, of George Herbert, 1853, pp 241-3)

"* J E B Mayor, Two Live* of JV Ferrar, by his brother John
and Dr Jebb, p 261 (quoted bv B Kirkman Gray, A History of
English Philanthropy, 1Q05, p 54)

Uo A True Report of the Great Cost and Charges of the foure
Hospitals m the City of London, 164-4 (quoted, ibid , p 66)

lal See, eg, Hist MSS Comm , Reports on MSS in various Col-
lections, vol i, 1Q01, pp 109-24, Leonard, Early History of English
Poor Relief, pp 268-9

122 Sir Matthew Hale, A Discourse touching Provision for the
Poor, 1683

^Stanley's Remedy, or the Way how to reform wandering Beg-
gars, Thieves, Highway Robbers and Pick-pockets, 1646 (Thomason
Tracts, E 317 [6]), p 4

^Commons' Journals, March 19, 1648/9, vol vi, p 167.

12*lbtd, vol vi, pp 201, 374, 416, 481, vol vn, p 167.

J'(1 Samuel Hartlib, London's Charity Inlarged, 1650, p. i.

127 Harthb, op at

12N Firth and Rait, Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1911,
vol 11, pp 104-10 An ordinance creating a corporation had been
passed Dec 17, 1647 (ibid, vol i, pp 1042-5)

12U Ibid , vol 11, pp 10Q8-Q

1JOStockwood, at Paul's Cross, 1578 (quoted by Haweis, Sketches
of the Reformation, p 277)

inSteele, op cit (note 76 above), p 22

132 R Younge, The Poorer' Advocate, 1654 (Thomason Tracts, E.
1452 F3J), p 6

1<!For these and olh-jr passages from Restoration economists to the
same effect, see a striking article by Dr T E Gregory on The Eco-
nomics of Employment in England (1660-1713) in Economica, no. i,
Jan, 1921, pp S7 seqq , and E S Furniss, The Position of the La-
bourer m a System of Nationalism, 1920, chaps v, vi

1M/)as KommtmistHche Manifest, 1Q18 ed , pp 27-8 "Die Bour-
geoisie, wo sic zur llerrschaft gekommen, hat alle feudalen, patriar-
chalischen, idyllischen verhaltmsse zer«tort Sie hat die bundscheckigen
Feudalbande, die den Mcnschen an semen naturlichen Vorgesetzten
knupften, unbarmherzig zcrnssen, und kein andeies Band zwischen
Mensch und Mensch ubng gelassen, als das nackte Interesse, als die
gefuhllose bare Zahlung "

136 Defoe, Giving Alms no Chanty, 1704, pp 25-7.

270 NOTES

180 Petty, Political Arithmetic, p 45

187 Sir Henry Pollexfen, Discourse of Trade, 1607, p 40, Walter
Harris, Remarks on the Affairs and Trade of England and Ireland,
1691, pp 43-4, The Querist, 1737 (in The Works of George Berke-
ley, D. D., ed A C Fraser, 1871, p 387), Thomas Alcock, Obser-
vations on the Defects of the Poor Laivs, 1752, pp 4^ seqq (quoted
Furniss, op cit , p 153)

138 Arthur Young, Eastern Tour, 1771, vol iv, p 361

189 Harrison, The Description of Britame, 1587 ed , bk 11, chap x,
Of Provision made for the Poor

140 H. Hunter, Problems of Poverty Selections from the Writ-
ings of Thomas Chalmers, D D, 1912, p 202

141 For the influence of Chalmer's idea on Senior, and, through him,
on the new Poor Law of 1834, see T Mackay, History of the English
Poor Law, vol ni, 1809, pp 32-4 Chalmers held that anv Poor Law
was in itself objectionable Senior, who described Chalmers' evidence
before the Committee on the State of the Poor in Ireland as "the
most instructive, perhaps, that ever was given before a Committee
of the House of Commons," appears to have begun by agreeing with
him, but later to have adopted the principle of deterrence, backed
by the test workhouse, as a second best The Commissioners of 1832-4
were right in thinking the existing methods of relief administration
extremely bad, they were wrong in supposing distress to be due
mainly to lax administration, instead of realizing, as was the fact,
that lax administration had arisen as an attempt to meet the increase
of distress. Their discussion of the causes of pauperism is, therefore,
extremely superficial, and requires to be supplemented by the evidence
contained in the various contemporary reports (such, e g , as those
on the hand-loom weavers) dealing with the industrial aspects of the
problem.

142 W C Braithwaite. The Second Period of Quakerism, 1910, pp
560-2. Defoe comments on the strict business standards of the
Quakers in Letter xvn (Of Honesty in Dealing} in The Complete
English Tradesman. Mr Ashton (Iron and Steel in the Industrial
Revolution, p 219) remarks, "The eighteenth century Friend no less
than the medieval Catholic held firmly to some doctrine of Just
Price," and quotes examples from the conduct of Quaker iron-masters

INDEX

Abbot's Ripton, 120, 253
Acton, Lord, 61
Acts of Parliament

15 Ed III, st. 1, c. 5 (1341), 51

37 Hen VIII, c 9 (1545), 136

5 and 6 Ed VI, c 20 (1552),
136, 153

13 Ehz, c 8 (1571), 136, 153,
154, 159

39 Ehz , c 2 (1597), 152
Aegidiu*; Lessmus, 242
Aeneas Silvius, 97
Agriculture, 117-128, 192 See also
Enclosures, Land, Pasture
farming, Peasants
Alcock, Thomas, 224
Alien immigrants, 170-1, 259
Almsgiving, condemnation of, 98,

101, 220, 251, a duty, 216
America, silver of, 64, 68, 116,

Calvinism m, 111-115, 189, 198,

265

Ames, 179-80, 262-3
Amsterdam, 93
Anglicans See Clergy and Church

of England
Annuities, 43, 181
Antwerp, 67-69, 72, 73, 77, 79, 92,

143, 151, 249, fall of, 70, 150
Apparel, excess in 101, 111
Aquinas See St Thomas
Archdeacons, visitations of, 48-9,

52, 138, 243-4, 255
Aristotle, 45
Asceticism, 23, 24
Ashton, T. S., 210, 269
Aske, 121
Augsburg, 72, 77

Bacon, 127, 129, 157

Baillie, 178

Bancroft, Archbishop, 158, 177, 178

Bank, at Geneva, 105-6

— of England, 209

Banking, deposit, beginnings of, 150

Barbon, Dr Nicholas, 205

Barebones, Praise-God, 205

Bargaining, equity in, 130, 136,
153-4. 155, 159, 184-6. 203,225-6
See also Prices and Profits

Bdio, 179, 262

Basle, 105, Council of, 92

Baxter, Richard, 16, 24, 167, 169,
172, 182-7, 188, 201, (quoted),
202 (quoted), 210, 215, 223, 238

Becon, 74, 121, 123

Beggars See Almsgiving and Va-
grancy

Belldrmin, 73, 249

Bellers, 24, 226

Belloc, H , 82

Bennet, Dr , 131

Benvenuto da Imola, (quoted), 18

Berkeley, Bishop, 224, 233

Beine, 105

Berthold, Brother, 187

Beza, 105, 107, 108, 179

Birmingham, 169

Bishops, articles of visitation of,
137, were normally justices, 141;
Bill re powers of, 148-9, 257;
abolition of, 159, 178 See also
Commissary, Court of fftgh Com-
mission and Courts, ecclesiastical

Blaxton, John, cited, 134

Bodin, 74

Boheim, Hans, 74

Bolmgbroke, 172

Bologna, University of, 73

Boniface VIII, 24, bull of, 26

Bossuet, 75

Boston, 112-4

Bourges, 50

Braddon, Lawrence, 259

Bradford, 169

— , Governor, 111 (quoted), 112

Brentano, 261

Bristol, 168

Brittany, Count of, 245

Bruges, 67

Bucer, 24, 61, 74, 75, 93, 102, 122
179

Bullinger, 24, 74, 101, 153

Bunyan, 16, 24, 166, 187, 223, 255

271

272

INDEX

Burford, 154

Buridanus, Johannes, 242

Bury, 181

Cahorsmes, 33, 240, 243

''Calling," 199-204, 260, 265

Calvin, 16, 24, 84, 01 -US, teaching
of, on usury, 74, 75, 110, 154,
179 180, 193, 199, letter of, to
Somerset, 102, Institute of. 102,
103, scheme of municipal govern-
ment drafted by, 103, death of,
105 See also Calvinism

Calvinism, 91-115, 194-5, sanctifi-
cation of economic enterprise by,
36-7, 92-3, 95, 96, 07, 98, 102,
193, 199, connection of individ-
ualism with, 09-100, 189, 261,
discipline of 99, 100, 102-115,
178-9, 182, 189, 195, 261, in
France, 109-10. in Scotland, 111,
development of, in England, 165,
in Holland, 175 See also Calvin
and Puntantsm

Cambridge, 262

Canon law. See Law, canon

Canonists, chicanery and casuistry
of, 39, 51, 53, 58, 97 See also
Law, canon

Canterbury, 171, archbishop of, 48,
133, Canons of, 137

Capitalism, early appearance of, 21-
2, 30, 76, 188, connection of,
with Puritanism, 176, 260-2

Carpenters, parliament of, 239

Cartwnght, Thomas, 177, 179

Catholicism, rind capitalism, 76, 261

Cattle, loaning of, 53, 132, 154

Cecil, William, 124, 141

Chalmers, Dr , 225 269

Charles I, social policy of, 144-8,
175-195-7, 264

Charles V, 66, 72

Chaucer, 28, (quoted), 248

Chauvet, 108

Chesterton, G K , 82

Chevage, 126

Chevisance, 5 1

Choisy, 252

Church, medieval, pomp and avarice
of, 57, 58, 59, attitude of, to
established social order, 55-7,
strength and weakness of, 57-8;
ideals of, 58-60

— of England, 116-63; conservatism
and ineffectiveness of social theory

of, 76-7, 132-4, 156-63, 231;
Puritanism represented in, 165

Church of Ireland, 137

See also Clergy, Councils
(Church), Courts (ecclesiasti-
cal), Low (canon), Papfuy, Ref-
ormation, Religion, and under
State

Churches, Nonconformist, attitude
of, to social pioblems in 18th cen-
tury, 230 See also Picsbytcnan-
tsni, Puiitanism, Tolerance

Civil La\v See Law, civil

Clarendon Code, 170

- — , Constitutions of, 50

— Earl of, 147, 170 207,209,266

Class hatred, 23, 108, 124

Classes, Puritan, 177, 181, 261, 262

Clayton, Sir Robert, 266

Clerg>, taking of usury by, 33, 46-
7, 52, 240, 246, suoservience of,
136, 230, return of, to City
churches, 170, popular sym-
pathies of, m France, 230 See
also Church of England

Cloth industry, 93, 117 122, 126,
capitalism in, 65, 150, 222-3,
distress in, 143, 170, 2S9, wages
in, 148, 240, 264, regulation of,
148, 196, 197, 264, Puritanism
in centers of, 168, 169, 170, 267,
proposed nationalization of, 106
See also Textile workers

Coke, 158

Colbert, 70, 196

Cologne, 40

Colonization, 66, 198, 264

Colquhoun, Patrick, 258

Columbus, 63, 64, 80

Combinations, 54, 78-0, 85-6, 239-
40 See also Gilds

Commissary, Court of, 52, 138, 246,
256

Commissions Depopulation, 118-9,
124, 147, 197, 264

Commons, enclosure of, 120, 143,
148, 212, 215 See also hn~
closures

"Commonwealth men " 124
Communal movement, 55
Communism, 35, 212

Companies, infringement of charters
of, 197 See also East India Co.
and Royal African Co
Confessors, instructions to, 49
Congregationalism^ f 165 "><. •

INDEX

273

Consistory, at Geneva, 102, 103,
104-9

Constance, Council of, 92

Consumption, 37, 192, 206, 208

Copper, 68, 69, 72

Copyholders, 119, 126, 143, 253

Corn, engrossing of, 108, 143, 148,
256 See also Granaries

Coulton, G G , 18, 33

Councils, Church, 46-7, 51, 53, 246

Court, De la, 171

Court of Arches, 158

—chancery, 51, 52, 241, 247

— Delegates, 158

—High Commission, 139, 158, 197,
258; abolition of, 159, 177, 178

—Requests, 119, 254

—Star Chamber, 119, 148, 253,
256, 257, 264, abolition of, 177

Courts, jurisdiction of, with regard
to usury, 40-1, 50-3, 137-8, ec-
clesiastical, 50-3, 137-8, 158-9,
177-8, 246, 247, royal, en-
croachments of, on feudal system,
56-7, 78 See also the several
Courts above-mentioned

Coventry, 40, 254

Craftsmen, deceits practiced by, 28,
110, 244, relations between mer-
chants and, 30, 117, 118, 148,
196, 265, labor of, honorable, 83,
199 See also G/Wv and Wage-
earners

Cianmer, 75, 137

Cromwell, Oliver, 166, 182
(quoted), 207, 214, 261

Crowley, Robert, 74, 121, 123
( quoted)

Cunningham, William, 176, 177
(quoted)

Curia, papal, 47-8

Currency, depreciation of, 70, 71,
118, 150

Danzig, 89

Debtor, defaulting, punishment of,

111

Dedham, classts of, 181
Detoe, 170, 210, 260, 268
Depopulation See Commissions

and Enclosures
DEwes, 180
Dicey, Prof ,211
Diet, Imperial, 79
Diggers, 212, 261
Disc.ioline. versus the Religion of

Trade, 176-89 See also

tsm, Presbytenamsm, Purttanitfk

Discoveries 63, 64, 68, 77, 78, 116,'
261

Dives et Pauper, 16, 180, 267

Downing, Sir George, 209

Duns Scotus, 36

Dutch, virtues of, 175, 210, 223;
capital supplied to England by,
207, 209, 267, imitation of meth-
ods of, 209 See also Holland

East Anglia, 148, Puritanism itt»
168-9

— India Co , 264

Kck, 7S

Economic Science, development of,
14-7, 72-3, 13S, 1S3, 157, 160,
170 207-8 See also Economists

Economists, 207, attitude of, to-
wards religious tolerance, 17,
170, 171-2. attitude of, toward^
poor relief, 223-6, 268-9. See
also Economic Snence

Edict of Nantes, revocation of, 17t

Education, diffusion of, 121, 122,
123, parochial, 132 See also
Schools

Enclosures, 118-28, popular agita-
tmns against, 118, 119, 120,
123-4, 213, 267, first account of,
119 steps taken by Government
to check, 119, 124-6, 147, 152,
196, 212, 254, 256, 257, attitude
of Puritans to 180, 186, 196,
212-16 See also under Gentry

England, comparison of, with the
Continent, 15, 22, 53, 65, 116,
192

Engrossers, 38, 39, 40, 42, 54, 105,
107, 108, 140, 143, 148, 162,
196, 198, 203, 256, 257

Erasmus, 67, 70

Eiastians, 178

Essex, 138, 168

Evangelicals, 163, 211

Exchanger, Royal, 197

Exchanges, foreign, discussions ori*
44, 135, 150-1, 261, control ol,
68, 143, 196, 197, 256, 264; law-C;
fulness of transactions on, 73+*4 '

Exchequer, stop of, 187 ;•

Exclusion Bill, 169

Excommunication, 32, 46, 47, 52^'
103, 106, 122, 137, 17&, 24&£>
disregarding of, 136, ISO '\<j

274

Exeter, 169, bishop of, 144

INDEX

Fairs, 46

Fenton, Rogei, quoted, 94

Ferrar, Nicholas, 218

Feudalism, 27, 55-57, 192, decline
of, 55-56, 126, 128, 148 See also
Peasants

Figgis, Dr , 13

Financiers, medieval attitude to, 28,
36, 93, international, rise of, 67,
69, 72; Catholicism of, 76, atti-
tude of Swiss reformers to, 92,
96 See also Usury

Fir mm, 226

Flanders See Low Countries

Flavell, John, 266

Fletcher of Saltoun, 220

Florence, 22, 39, 50, 238, 241, 261

Foley, Thomas, 210

Fonclaco Tedesco, 63

Food-supplies, control of, 148, 195,

196, 217-218 See also Corn
Fox, 166, 167

Foxe, 137

France, 53, 70, 196, 207, 222, 230,
240, 248, 259, peasant! y m, 56,
57, 117, 129, Calvinism in, 109-
110, 169, 198 See also Lyons
and Paris

Franciscans, 23, 53, Spiritual, 55

Franeker, University of, 180

Frankfurt, 30, 69, 77, 97

Franklin, Benjamin, 198, 265

Free Cities, 55

Freeholders, 168, 169, 214

Freiburg, 77

Friars, 24

Friends See Quakers

Friesiand, West, 198

Froissart, 24

Froude, 12

Fruiterers, of London, 54

Fuggers, the, 72, 73, 74, 79, 81,
162, 249

Gay, Prof, 125

Geiler von Kaiserberg, 79, 250

Geneva, 92, 99, 101-110, 179, 188,

189, 195, 252
Genoa, 48
Gentry, opposition of, to prevention

of enclosures, 124, 126, 151, 196,

197, 212-213, 214, 254, attitude
of, to commercial classes, 172-175

George, Lloyd, quoted, 12, 237

Germany, 53, 64, 70, 207; schemes
of social reconstruction in, 31,
79, 248, peasantry in, 56, 57, 74,
75, 78, 79, 82, 83, 117, 119, 129,
248, trade and banking business
of, 64, 65, 68, 69, 72, 77-79, 80-
81, 201, Reformation in, 72, 73-
74, 75, 77-00, c>7, 121 wage-
eainmg class in, in Middle \ges,
78, 239

Gilds, membership of, 30, policy
and ideals of, 30-32, enforcement
of rules, 52, 256, loans by, 53,
247 capture of, by capitalist
membeis 64, 78, 117, control of,
at \ntwerp, 6°, malpractices of,
1 18, 239, confiscation of lands of,
120, 254

Glasgow 198

dloucestiM K>0

GculfHx , Mu ha el, 200

Goldsmiths 207

Giananes public 1^6, 264

Gratia n 35, 3 >

Grew \ VII 24

— , Sir Ihomas, 16, 122, 151 152

Gnndal, Archbishop, 137

Grosstf'te, Bishop, 33, 240

Hague, The, 209

Hale Sir Matthew, 219

Hales, ]ohn, 124

Halifax, 160

Hamilton, John See Si Andrews,

Archbishop o)

Hammond Mr and Mrs, 23-24
Hanse League, 63, 68
Harrington, 150
Harris, Walter, 224
Harrison, 224
Harthb Samuel, 220
Hatfield, Chase, 148
Hangs, the, 72
Heming, Nicholas, 134, 135

(quoted)

Henry of Ghent, quoted, 36
— of Langenstem, quoted, 38, 43
Herberts, the, 120, 125
Hmde, 258
Hipler, 79, 250
Hobbes, 23

Hochstetters, the, 72, 79, 249
Holland, 15, wars and commercial

rivalry of England with, 14, 207,

209, 222, 266, religious develop-

INDEX

275

ments in 17, 175, 189, economic
progress of, 17, 170, 175, 180
192, 261, controversy in, about
usury, 110, 198, middle classes
in, 173, 175, emigration of Dis-
senters to, 259. See also Dutch
and Low Countries

Holland, Lord, 197

Hooker, Richard, 141, 145, 195

Hospitals, 123, 218, loans by, 53,
247

Hostiensis, 135, 249

Houblon, James and John, 209

House of Commons, 123, 152, 159,
219

— of Convocation, 137

Huguenots, 209

Humanists, 72, 97, 100, 217

Hungary, 60, 72

Hutten, 79, 250

Imhofs, the, 72

Independents, 99, 176, 178, 182,
209

Indians, American, 114, 157

Indifferentism, 23, 24, 159, 229

Indixidualism, rise of, 17, 20, 27,
61, 68, 73, 121, 139, 142, 146,
149-163, 189, 196, 208, 210, 211,
217, 261, deduction of, from
teaching of reformers, 75-76, 81,
99-100, 188-9 See also under
Pui itantsm

Industrial Revolution, 24, 163

Innocent IV, 33, 45, 240

Intcresse, 43, 44, 85

Interest, rate of, 105, 108, 131, 138,
153, 267, "pure," 43, true and
unfeigned, not usury, 249. See
also Intercssc and Usury

Ireland, 192, 224, 269, Church of,
137

Ireton, 214

Iron industry, 16&, 183, 210, 269

Italy, 16, 53, 67, medieval capital-
ism in, 30, 76, 77-78, 261; wage-
earners in, 30, 40, 238, financiers
of, 33, 46, 68, 117, canonists of,
S3, economic position of, 62-63,
64, 65, 192. See also Florence
and Venice

Jacquerte, 56

Jewel, Bishop, 74, 133

Jews, 39, 207

John XXII, bull of. 5$

John of Salisbury, quoted, 27, 29,
238

Joint-stock enterprise, outburst of,
150

Jones, Rev David, 204

Journeymen See Wage-earners

Justices in Eyre, 51
—of Assize, 147
— of the Peace, usurers dealt with
by, 140, 143, regulation of mar-
kets and of wages by, 148, clos*
ing of public-houses by, 181-182;
administration of poor laws by,
196 218-219, administration of
orders against enclosures by, 147,
211

Keane, Robert, 112-114
Ket, 123, 248
Keynes, J M , 208, 235
Kidderminster, 172, 183
King's Lynn, 247, 254
Knewstub, 179, 262
Knox, John, 16, 24, 101, 104 (quot-
ed), 111, 177

Lancashire, Puritanism in, 169, 178,
267 See also Bury

Land, 16, 118-28, purchase of, by
nouveaux riches, and speculation
in, 78, 120-1, 123-4, 150, 173,
?13, mortgaging of, 92, 144. See
a'so Enclosures, Landlords, P as-
tute farming, Property, Rent-
charge, Rents

Landlords, oppressions of, 50, 120,
13^, 140, 143, 147, 186, 196,
198 24S, ecclesiastical, manage-
ment of estates by, 57, 120, 123.
See also Peasants and Rents

Lanfranc, 23

Langland, 24, 216

Lateran Councils, 47, 53

Latimer, 16, 24, 74, 121, 125, 211,
213, 217, 227, 235

Laud, 16, 24, 100, 116, 145-9, 159,
171, 175, 177, 196, 197, 211, 256

Laurentius de Rudolfts, 16, 238

Law, canon, 16, 141 ; rules of, as to
ubury, 17, 39-54, 84-85, serf**
dom recognized by, 56-57; dis-
credit of, 60, 61, 123, 136, 158; „
continued appeal to, 74, 77,
130-9, 251-2; compatibility o!
exchange business with, 73. See
also Canoijijts

276

INDEX

— , civil, 136-7

— .common, 136, 138, 158

—, natural, 41, 59, 152-3, 162, 215,

228

Law, John, 210
— , William, 161
Lay ton, Dr , 136
Leach, A F, 122
Leadam, 125
Lease-mongers, 123
Lee, Joseph, quoted, 215
Leeds, 169

Leicester, 160, 213, 214
Leonard, Miss, 148
Levellers, 24, 176, 212, 261
Lever, 74, 121, 123, 133
Linen industry, 122
Lisbon, 72, 77, 79
Loans, charitable, 53, 132, 140, 218,

247, public, indemnification of
subscribers to, 152 See also
Interest and Vsitiy

Locke, 14, (quoted), 152, 160, 207,
214

Lollards, 50

Lombard bankers, 33, 51

London, 30, 51, 54, 120, 218,
growth of money-maiket in, 69,
117, 150, Nonconformity in, 93,
168, 169, 170, 178, 202, 209,
fire of, 170, 183, bishop of, 33,
53, 138, 239

Lotteries, 110, 252

Low Countuei,, 65, 66, 67, 70, 192,
early capitalism in, 22, 29, 76,
239, 261, wage-earners m, 30,
40, 239, Mont* de Piete in, 53,

248, religious tolerance m, 171
See also Antwerp and PI oil and

Luchaire, A , 33

Luther, 16, 24, 38, 72-91, 92, 93,

95, 102, 200, 220, 244
Lyndwood, 54
Lyons, 69, 70, 105 Poor Men of,

24, Council of, 47

Machiavelli, 14, 73, 156, 261

Maidstone, 171

Maitland, 136

Major, 95

Malynes, G., 151

Mandeville, 161 (quoted), 258

Manning, B L , 24

Marx, Karl, 39, 99, 223

Massachusetts, 112, 198

Melanchthon, 74, 82, 95, 135

Mendicant oiders, 83

Mercantilism, 34, 73, 197, 208

Merchant Adventures, 63

Merchants See Traders

Merchet, 126

Meutmgs, the, 72, 249

Middle classes, rise of, 15, 77, 78,
84, 98, 150, 173, 195, 223, Cal-
vinism and Puritanism among,
98, 100, 158, 108-175, 17S-6,
192, 221. 261, qualities of, 98,
173, 175, 191-2 humblei, atti-
tude of, to using commercialism,
139-40, economic position of,
172-3, 202, 260

Middlemen See Traders

Mills, James, 202

Milton, 192

Mines of New World, 64, of Eu-
rope 63-64, 69, 72, capitalism in
working of, bS, 150

Monarch}, pateinal, 17^, 193, 195,
196-7, 210, 264 See also C/iarlcs
I and Tudor rs

Monasteries, loans b> , S^, 247 re-
lief of beggars by, 83, 100, 221;
dissolution of, 119-21, 123, 253,
254

Mone>lendcis See I nit test, Loans
(pnhlic), Usury

Mone\ -market See Exchanges,
Financier, and under London

Monopolies See Patents

Monopolists, denimu.it ions of, 40,
73-4, 79, 83, 86, 10S, 184

Montesquieu, 173

Motifs de Ptete, 44 53, 248, 265

Mooie. John, 213, 215

More, Sn Thomas, 67, 119

Mosse, Miles, 134, 135, 137
(quoted)

Mullms, Archdeacon, 255

Nationalism, 63, 70
Netherlands See Low Countries
New England, Calvinism m, 111-15,

189, 198

New Model Army, 182
Nicholas III, 33
Nonconformists See Chwches

(Noncomfonmst) , Independents,

Presbytenamsm, Puritanism,

Quakers, Tolerance
Norfolk, 144, 16&

INDEX

277

North, Sir Dudley, quoted, 208
Notre-Dame, Cathedral of, 33, 240
Nhrnberg, 77, 97

O'Brien, G , 44 (cited)
(Ecolampadius, 74, 94, 101
Oresme, Nicholas, 16, 238
Owen, Robert, 226
Oziander, 75

Paget, 124

Paley, 23$

Pallavicmo, 1 51

Papacy, avarice and corruption of,

33, 77, 80-3, 83, 97, 98, finan-
cial relations of, 33, 45, 243
Papillon, Thomas 209
Papists, unaptness of, for business,

172, charity of, 194, 220, 265

265
Pans, 30, 69, 73, 105, 109, 240,

bishop of, 33, 240
Parish, loans by, 53, 132, 247, or-

gam/alion of 132, 257
Parker, Bishop, 140
Parliament, Level lei b' demands for

reform of, 212

Parliament, Barebones, 182, 205
— , Long, 149, 159, 197, 212, 213
"Parliaments," of wage-earners, 30,

239
Partnership, profits of, ld\\ful, 43,

242, fictitious 49, 243
Pasture farming, 117, 118, 119, 120,

122, 124, 147, 1S1 bee also

EncloMii rv

Patents, 190, 197, 264
Pawnshops public, 140
Peasants, associations among, 31 ,

harshness of lot of, "56, levolts of,

56, 57, 65, 120, 12S-4, 212-13,
248, revolts of, in Geimany, 56,

57, 74, 75, 79, 82, 83, 119, 124,
248, emancipation of, from serf-
dom, 56, 57, 64, 78, 117, 126,
comparison of, with peasantry of
France and Germany, 57, 78, 117,
129, calling of, piaised, 82 See
also Jacquctn and Landlords

Peckham, Archbishop, 33

Pecock, Bishop, 50, 54, 89, 244,

248

Penn, William, 159
Pennsylvania, 198
Pepper, 69

Pepys, 170

Petty, Sir William, 171, 207, 209
(quoted)

Piccarda, 23

Pilgrimage of Grace, 121

Pirenne, Prof , 68, 239

Political Arithmetic, 17, 157, 160
170, 208 See also Economic
Science

Pollexfen, Sn Henry, 224

Ponet, 74, 121

Poor, relief of, 74, 83, 101, 121,
123, 132, 138, 163, 198, invest-
ment of monev ioi benefit of,
110, 154, 252, legislation re re-
lief of. 111, 217-18 219-20, 225,
268, 269, administration of laws
for relief of, 143, 148, 196, 218;
right of, to relief, 219, 225,
relief to, to be deterrent, 225,
268-9, able-bodied, employment
of, 143, 217-18, 219, 220, 225,
268 See aKo Alw&givmg, Pov-
ctty, Valiancy

— Law Commissioners, 225, 269

— Men of Lyons, 24
Poitug.il, 60, 65, 66, 68, 69, 76
Povert} , attitude of Swics reform-

eis to, 93, 100-1, 115, attitude
to, in eighteenth century, 160-1;
attitude of Puritans to, 193-4,
210-12, 216-226, medieval atti-
tude to, 216-268, attitude of
Qiuikeis to, 226, causes of, 217,
219-20,220-22,224,269 See also
Poor

Predestination, 96. 99

Presbytenamsm, 165, 177-78, 180-1,
262 263 See also Pwtlanisn

Pi esb> terians 169, 172, 209, strug-
gle between Independents and,
99, 176, 178

Prices, ii^e in, 16, 65, 69, 74, 118,
126, 150, 153, just, doctrine with
regard to, 22, 39, 42, 74, 85,
131, 133, 180, 184, 187, 203,
223, 240, 242, 262, 269, control
of, 43, 103, 105, 107, 108, 112-
14, 122, 143, 148, 217-18, 264;
opposition to control of, 152, 195,
259-60 See also Bargaining

Privy Council, activities of, 142-4,
147-8, 196-7, 265

Production, 206, 267, 208

278 INDEX

Profits, medieval doctrine as to, 35,
37-8, 43, 93, attempted limita-
tion of, in New England, 111-14
See also Traders

Property, theories with regard to,
35, 91, 125-28, 160, 214, 216,
217-18

Prophesy ings, 167

Public-houses, closing of, 182

Puritanism, 164-226, quarrel be-
tween monarchy and, 14, 177,
193, 195-7, 263, medieval, 24,
discipline of, 100, 111-4, 158,
177-82, 195, 261, theology of,
100, 189-91, connection of indi-
vidualism with, 99-100, 111, 176,
177, 182, 188, 191-8, 210, 211,
221,225, 226, 261, divergent ele-
ments in, 155, 176-7,261, sancti-
fication of business life by, 165,
167, 191, 194, 199-211, 225, geo-
graphical distribution of, 168-9;
connection of, with capitalism,
176, 268. See also Galvanism,
Middle classes, New England,
Poverty, Presbytcrtamsm, Usury

Quakers, 24, 226, 269

Quarter Sessions See Justices oj

the Peace
Quicksilver, 72

Rabelais, 71

Rationalism, medieval, 24

Reformation, relation of, to changes
in social theory, 21, 24-5, 61-2,
74, 74-7, 80-4, 121, 132, 133-7

Regensburg, 77, 187

Religion, sphere of, all-embracing,
12, 15-17, 20, 23-4, 24-38, 58-9,
74-7, 81, 86-7, 88, 127, 129-49,
154-5, 184, 186-8, 228, 229,
230-1, 234 (see also under Trad-
ers) ; economic and social activ-
ities excluded from province of,
12-13, 13-19, 22-3, 81-2, 86-90,
149, 150-63, 184, 188, 198, 211,
227, 228-235, wars of, 14, 105
See also Asceticism, Galvanism,
Indifferentism, Prei> bytenanism,
Purttantsm, Reformation, Toler-
ance

Rent-charge, considered lawful, 44,
as, 154, 179, 181, 242

Rents, control of, at Geneva, 103;
raising of, 105, 120, 125, 131;
Baxter's teaching as to, 186

Rhode Island, 198

Riches, medieval attitude to, 35-6,
36, 54, 233, 248, attitude of Cal-
vimsts and Puritans to, 93, 115,
191, 198-9, 221-2, modern atti-
tude to, 231-35. See also Finan-
ciers and Traders

Ridley, Thomas, quoted, 158

Ripon, 52

Rome, corruption and avarice at,
32-33, 77, 81, 83, 98

Root and Branch Petition, 259

Rotenburg, 77

Rouen, 69

Rousseau, 240

Royal African Co , 207, 266

St Ambrose, 216

St Andrews, 111, archbishop of, 50

St Antonio, 16, 22, 35, 42, 80, 187,
238, 241, 242

St Augustine, 48

St Bernard, 33

St Francis, 23, 55

St. Johns, the, 120, 253

St Leon, Martin, 31, 239, 240

St Raymond, 48, 131

St Thomas, 22, 25, 34, 36, 38, 41,
42, 58, 130, 187, 216, 249

Salerno, archbishop of, 48

Salisbury, bishop of, 133, mayor of,
181

Sanderson, Bishop, 159

Sandwich, 171

Sandys, Bishop, 74, 133

Sdy, J B, 11

Saye and Sele, Lord, 148, 257

Schoolmen, 16, 22, 25, 34-39, 42-3,
73, 75, 127, 130, 133, 135, 155,
187 See also St Antomo and
St Thomas

Schools, confiscation of endowments
of, 122-3, 254, establishment of,
by Church, 163 See also Educa-
tion

Schulze-Gaevernitz, 176

Scotland, 100, 111, 189, Commis-
sioners from, 178

Scriveners, 150

Self-interest, of individual, harmony
of needs of society with, 19, 28-
29, 152, 161, 162-3, 204, 215-
217, 227. See also Individualism

Senior, Nassau, 225, 269

Serfdom, 55-7, attitude of Church
to, 27, 56-8 See also Peasants.

Serfs, runaway, 126, 253 See also
Peasants

Seville, 69, 116

Shaftesbury, Ecirl of, 207

Shaw, W A , 178

Sheep-grazing See Pasture j arming

Sheldon, Dr Gilbert, 257

Sidney, Sir Philip, 120

Sigismund, Emperor, Refoimation
of, 79, 240

Silver, of America, 64, 68, 116, of
Europe, 72

Sion, Monastery of, 120

Slave- trade, 1S7

Smiles, Samuel, 210

Smith, Adam, 38, 162, 210, 240

— , Rev Henry, 179, 262

— , Sir Thomas, 136

Smiths, of London, 52, 239, 246

Soap, monopoly of, 197, 264

Social Democratic movement, 182

Society, functional theory of, 19,
27-9, 83, 87, 127, 144-6, 146,
146-7, 160, 162, 211, modern
conception of, 19, 27, 160, 162

Somerset, Duke of, 102, 126, 254

South Sea Rubble, 162

Spam, 65, 66, 70, 72, 76, dealers
of, on Antwerp Bouise, 73

Speculation See r.nqio\'\ii!>

Speenhamland, 219

Spices, trade in, 08, 69, 72, 77

Spinola, 151

Spurriers, of London, 52, 246

Starkey, 27, 119, 238

State, relation between Church and,
13-17, 23-4, 25, 65, 81-2, 90-1,
109, 136 141-2, 145-6, 146-7,
149, 2 2 8-9, Locke's conception of,
14 (quoted), 152, 160, unitary,
soveteignty of, 228, 239, Distrib-
utive, 83, 129

Steelc, Richard, 200, 202, 202-4,
208, 221

Step-lords, 125

Stockwood, Rev J , quoted, 220

Strafford, Earl of, 175, 177, 196

Strassburg, 69

Stubbes, Philip, 179

Summa, 22, 25, 34, 183. See also
Schoolmen

Swift, Dean, 172

INDEX 279

Switzerland, Reformation in, 91-110,
121, 220, bourgeoisie in, 98, 107,
173

Synods, French, 109-10

Taunton, 169

Taylor, Jeremy, 137 (quoted), 159

Temple, Sir William, 171

Tenures, military, abolition of, 213

Textile workers, of Elanders and
Italy, 30, 239, of Pans, 239.
*or England see under Cloth in-
dustry

Tobacco, 111

Toleiance, lebgious, 100, 104, 149,
182, commercially advantageous,
17, 164, 170-1

Tories, distrust of commercial classes
by 172

Torrens, R , 11

Townsend, Rev J , 258

Trade, flourishing of, under religious
tolerance, 17, 164, 170-1, free
exercise of, 152, foreign, increase
in, 117, ISO, balance of, 205, 208

Trade unionism, 30, 23°

Traders, medieval attitude to, 22-3,
28, 35, 36-8, 30, 82, relations
between craftsmen and, 30, 117,
118, 147-8, 196, 264, sanctifica-
tion of occupation of, 36-7, 92,
95-6, 96, 97, 98, 101, 165-6, 167,
191, 194, 109-210, 211, 226,
frauds and extoition of 50, 93,
104, 110, 122, 131, 133-4, 245,
253, Luther's attitude to, 82;
growth of power of, 117, 118,
purchase of land by, 120, 173;
break-down of State control of,
152, 196 See also Bai gaining,
Prices, Pi o fits

Ti avers, W , 177

Trocltsch, Prof, 81, 176, 260

Tucker, Dean, 17, 162, 164 (quoted),
258

Tudors, social policy of, 140-145,
195, 217-18, 221, 224

Turgot, 240

Turks, 64

Tyndale, 254, 268

Tyrol, 64, 69, 72

Udall, J, 258

Ulm, 77

Unwm, Prof., 148

Usher, R. G, 168

Usury, controversy on, 16, 73, 74,

INDEX

132-40, 151, 1S3-5; teaching of
medieval Church on, 22, 39-41,
43-54, practicing of, on a large
scale, in Middle Ages, 33, 45-6,
150, restitution of profits of, 33,
46-7, 47, 49, enforcement of pro-
hibition of, 39, 46-52, 89, 105,
106, 108, 111, 137-8, 140, 144,
159, 197, 198, 243-4, 244-5, 255,
prevalence of 41, 129-30, popular
denunciations of, 41, 74, 119, 123,
130, annuities, compensation for
loss, profits of partnership and
rent-charges not regarded as, 43,
44, 85, 154, 180-1, 241-2, eccle-
siastical legislation as to, 47, 51,
54, devices for concealment of,
47, 48, 52, 243, secular legisla-
tion as to, 51-2, 131, 136, 153,
159, attitude of reformers to, in
Germany, 74, 75, 84, 85, 89; in
Switzerland, 74, 75, 92, 93-6,
103, 104-9, 154, 179, 180, in
France, 110, 252, meaning of
term, 130-1, 136-7, 154, disap-
pears from episcopal charges, 1 62 ,
Puritan attitude to, 174, 177,
179-80, 181, 185, 187, 192-3,
198-9, 204, 209, 223, 262, 263,
264 See also Clergy, Interest,
Loans

Utilitarianism, 202, 225
Utrecht, University of, 198

Vagrancy, measures for suppression
of, 83, 143, 181, 217-8, 218, 220,
223-4, 225, increase of, 218, 220.
See also Almsgtvtng and Poor

Value, theories of, 38, 41-2

Venezuela, 72

Venice, 64, 65, 68, 69, 78, 105, 261

Vienne, Council of, 47

Villeinage. See Serfdom

Virtues, economic, applauding of,
by Caivmists and Puritans, 93,
97, 98, 101, 189-210, 225-6, 226

Vitry, Jacques de, 248

Vives, 100, 217

Voltaire, 173

Wadsworth, A P , 267

Wage-earners, small number of, 30,
40, 118, 129, 172, 222, 239; or-
ganizations of, 30, attitude of
economists to, 222-24. See also
Wages

Wages, withholding of, 50, 185,
245, regulation of, 112, 148, 195,
196, 240, 244, payment of, in
truck, 131, 148, 196, economists'
views on the subject of, 222-5,
225 See also Wage-earners

Wallas, Graham, 19

Wamba, 81

Warburton, 162

Ward, Sir Patience, 209

Warwick, Earl of, 124

Warwickshire, 119, 267

Wa^herne, 120

Wealth See Production and Riches

Weber, Max, 176, 260-1, 262, 265

Welsers, the, 72, 79, 249

Wentworth, 148

We?ley, 161

Westminster Assembly. 17, 178, 181

Whalley, ecclesiastical court of, 52

Whalley, Major-General, 214, 267

Whigs, 169, 210

Whitby, Abbey, 120

Whole Duty of Man, The, 162

Widows and orphans, usury for ben-
efit of, 154, 193

Wi'cox, Thomas, 138

Williams, Roger, 112

WiNon, Thomas, 133, 134, 136, 152,
195, 263

Wiltshire, 182, 197

Wmstanley, Gerrard, 99 (quoted),
212

Witt, John de, 171

Wolsey, 119, 126

Wood, H G , 262

Woodrow, Rev Robert, quoted, 198

Woollen industry See Cloth indus-
try

Worcester, Priory of, 44

Workhouses, 220, 224, 225, 269

Works, good, 88, 96, 98, 199, 201,
221, 265

Wychf, 23, 29 (quoted), 31, 41
(quoted), 42, 239

Yarranton, A , 210
Yeomanry, 56, 168
York. Province of 137, 144
Yorke, Sir John, 120
Yorkshire, 121, 138, 169
Young, Arthur, 224
Younge, R , quoted, 221

Ztirich, 92, 101, 103
Zwingli, 74, 92, 101, 103

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