Chapter II: The Continental Reformers (2)

Luther accepted the social hierarchy, with its principles of status and subordination, though he knocked away the ecclesiastical 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 sharpened 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 exalted 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 that villeinage should end, because “Christ has delivered and redeemed us all, the lowly as well as the great, without exception, by the shedding of His precious blood,”[II-38] 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 message into a program of social reconstruction. “This article would make all men equal and so change the spiritual kingdom of Christ into an external worldly one. Impossible! 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.’”[II-39] 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 capitalist 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 striking than that between his social theory and the outlook of Calvin. Calvin, with all his rigor, accepted the main institutions 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 representatives of the human race. International trade, banking and credit, capitalist industry, 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 jurisprudence, unsoftened by the qualifications with which canonists themselves had attempted to adapt its rigors to the exigencies 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.”[II-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 estimation. 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 corner 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 interest.... The devil invented it, and the Pope, by giving his sanction to it, has done untold evil throughout the world.”[II-41] Not content with insisting that lending ought to be free, he denounces the payment of interest as compensation 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 burial. 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. “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 combinations 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 outright monopolies, which even heathen civil laws--I will say nothing of divine right and Christian law--condemn as a plainly harmful thing in all the world?”[II-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 chastised 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 human 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 between a sublime theory and a hideous reality had long been intolerable, is the supreme example. He preaches a selfless charity, but he recoils with horror from every institution by which an attempt had been made to give it a concrete expression. He reiterates 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 abhorrence. 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 may overflow in its social relations; but those relations can supply no particle of spiritual nourishment to make easier the reception of grace. Like 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 certain that absolutely none among outward things, under whatever name they may be reckoned, has any influence in producing Christian righteousness or liberty.... One thing, and one alone, is necessary for life, justification and Christian liberty; and that is the most holy word of God, the Gospel of Christ.”[II-43]

The difference between loving men as a result of first loving 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 intellectual processes by which Luther reached his conclusions, is one for theologians. Its effects on social theory were staggering. 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 blasphemous 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 negation. 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 Christian 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, secularized; 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, the distinction became more profound than ever before. For, though all might be sanctified, it was their inner life alone which could partake 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 sanctions, 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 questions emphasis on the traditional Christian morality is combined 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 intention, at least, is not to jettison the rules of good conscience in economic matters, but to purify them by an immense effort of simplification. His denunciation of medieval 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 machinery beyond the conscientious discharge of the ordinary duties 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 commandments: ‘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 judicial actions would be required; all things would quietly and simply be set to rights, for every one’s heart and conscience would guide him.”[II-44]

“Everything would arrange itself.” Few would deny it. But how if it does not? Is emotion really an adequate substitute for reason, and rhetoric for law? Is it possible to solve the problem which social duties present to the individual by informing him that no problem exists? If it is true that the inner life is the sphere of religion, does it necessarily 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 dismissal of law and learning, when he urged that it was useless for the Church to prohibit extortion, unless it was prepared to undertake the intellectual labor of defining the transactions to which the prohibition applied.[II-45] 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 Dantzig 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.”[II-46]

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 general 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 world 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 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 justification, 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.”[II-47] The logic of Luther’s religious premises was more potent for posterity than his attachment 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 dualism which, as its implications were developed, emptied religion 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 institution 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 restraints. 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 is 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 commerce 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.”[II-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 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 Protestantism 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 conservative, 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 influence 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 society, it possessed from the beginning one characteristic which was both novel and important. It assumed an economic organization which was relatively advanced, and expounded its social ethics on the basis of it. In this respect the teaching of the Puritan moralists who derive most directly from Calvin is in marked contrast with that both of medieval 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 social theory, but also of Luther and his English contemporaries, 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 system in motion. When they criticize economic abuses, 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 unscrupulous 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 property 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 mortgaging of land on the security of crops; and, while emphasizing that interest must be paid when the State sanctions it, condemns it in itself as contrary to the law of God.[II-49] Of the attempts made at Zürich and Geneva to repress extortion something is said below. But these full-blooded denunciations of capitalism were not intended by their authors to supply a rule of practical life, since it was the duty of the individual 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 enterprise in commerce and finance. Like early Christianity and modern socialism, Calvinism was largely an urban movement; like them, in its earlier days, it was carried from country 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 treatment of economic interests as a quite minor aspect of human affairs, must have seemed irrelevant or artificial. As was to be expected 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, London, and Amsterdam, its leaders addressed their teaching, 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 recognition 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, regarding a preoccupation with economic interests “beyond what is necessary for subsistence” as reprehensible, had stigmatized 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 to 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?”[II-50] It was quite in accordance with the spirit of those words that Bucer, even while denouncing the frauds and avarice of merchants, should urge the English Government to undertake the development of the woollen industry on mercantilist lines.[II-51]

Since it is the environment of the industrial and commercial classes which is foremost in the thoughts of Calvin and his followers, they have to make terms with its practical necessities. It is not that they abandon the claim of religion to moralize economic life, but that the life which they are concerned 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 designed. 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 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 powerful and growing body of social interests, which, however irrepressible in practice, had hitherto been regarded by religious theory as, at best, of dubious propriety, and, at worst, as frankly immoral. Strictly construed, the famous pronouncement 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 apothecarie doth with poyson.”[II-52] The apologetic was just, for neither his letter to Œcolampadius, 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 borrower must reap as much advantage as the lender, that excessive 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 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 organizer 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 defenders 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 money-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 discussion of the subject is that he assumes credit to be a normal and inevitable incident in the life of society. He therefore dismisses the oft-quoted passages from the Old Testament 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 dictated by natural justice and the golden rule. He makes, in short, a fresh start, argues that what is permanent is, not the rule “_non fœnerabis_,” _but_ “_l’équité et la droiture_,” and appeals from Christian tradition to commercial common sense, which he is sanguine enough to hope will be Christian. On 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 interest, provided that the rate is reasonable and that loans are made freely to the poor, is not _per se_ more extortionate 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 concentration on the task of using for the glory of God the opportunities which they offered, that the Christian life could and must be lived.

It was on this practical basis of urban industry and commercial 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,” Calvin wrote, “the fall of the first man, ... but also arranged all by the determination of his own will.”[II-53] Certain individuals he chose as his elect, predestined to salvation from eternity by “his gratuitous mercy, totally irrespective of human merit”; the remainder have been consigned to eternal damnation, “by a just and irreprehensible, but incomprehensible, judgment.”[II-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 culture, are at best irrelevant to salvation, and at worst mischievous. They distract man from the true aim of his existence 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 practical. Good works are not a way of attaining salvation, but they are indispensable as a proof that salvation has been attained. 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 exemplification. For the Calvinist the world is ordained to show forth the majesty of God, and the duty of the Christian is to live 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 order 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 Middle Ages close in the golden autumn which, amid all the corruption and tyranny of the time, still glows in the pictures of Nürnberg and Frankfurt drawn by Æneas Silvius and in the woodcuts of Dürer. 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 tension 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 Humanists took another, which should lead to the gradual regeneration of mankind by the victory of reason over superstition 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 qualities which economic success demanded--thrift, diligence, sobriety, frugality--were themselves, 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 material interests as the kingdom of darkness, but by dedicating them to the service of God?

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 fostered by obedience to Rome. The Roman Church, it was held, through the example of its rulers, had encouraged luxury and ostentation: the members of the Reformed Church must be economical and modest. It had sanctioned the spurious charity of indiscriminate almsgiving: the true Christian 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 savorless formality of individual good works reduced to a commercial 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 rebuked 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 government, 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 carrière ouverte_--not _aux talents_, but _au caractère_.

Once the world had been settled to their liking, the middle classes persuaded themselves that they were the convinced enemies of violence and the devotees of the principle of order. While their victories were still to win, they were everywhere 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 century 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 lesson, 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 embodiment in social institutions. Though logically connected, they were often in practical discord. The influence of Calvinism was not simple, but complex, and extended far beyond the circle of Churches which could properly be called Calvinist. Calvinist theology was accepted where Calvinist discipline was repudiated. The bitter struggle between Presbyterians and Independents in England did not prevent men, to whom the whole idea of religious uniformity was fundamentally abhorrent, from drawing inspiration from the conception of a visible Christian society, in which, as one of them said, the Scripture was “really and materially to be fulfilled.”[II-55] Both an intense individualism and a rigorous Christian Socialism could be deduced from Calvin’s doctrine. Which of them predominated depended on differences of political environment and of social class. It depended, above all, on the question whether Calvinists were, as at Geneva 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 Government.

In the version of Calvinism which found favor with the English upper classes in the seventeenth century, individualism in social affairs was, on the whole, the prevalent philosophy. 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, diluted 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 discipline, compared with which that of Laud, as Laud himself dryly observed,[II-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 circumstances favored it, for a discipline far more stringent and comprehensive than that of the Middle Ages. If, as some historians 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 indirect. 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 modification by the pressure of commercial interests, or of a balance of power between conflicting authorities.

The spirit of the system is suggested by its treatment of the burning question of Pauperism. The reform of traditional methods of poor relief was in the air--Vives had written his celebrated book in 1526[II-57]--and, prompted both by Humanists 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 appealed strongly to the ethical spirit of the Reformation. The characteristic of the Swiss reformers, who were much concerned with it, was that they saw the situation not, like the statesman, as a problem of police, nor, like the more intelligent 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 almsgiving as vehemently as any Utilitarian, and urged that the ecclesiastical authorities should regularly visit every family to ascertain whether its members were idle, or drunken, or otherwise undesirable.[II-58] Œcolampadius wrote two tracts on the relief of the poor.[II-59] Bullinger lamented the army of beggars produced by monastic charity, and secured part of the emoluments of a dissolved abbey for the maintenance of a school and the assistance of the destitute.[II-60] In the plan for the reorganization of poor relief at Zürich, which was drafted by Zwingli in 1525, all mendicancy was strictly forbidden; travellers were to be relieved on condition that they left the town next day; provision was to be made for the sick and aged in special institutions; 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, “will 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.”[II-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 gambling, swearing, excess in apparel and self-indulgence in eating and drinking. The essence of the system was not preaching or propaganda, though it was prolific of both, but the attempt to crystallize a moral ideal in the daily life of a visible society, which should be at once a Church and a State. Having overthrown monasticism, 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 truly preached, but manners and religion so sincerely reformed I have not yet seen in any place besides.”[II-62] Manners and morals were regulated, because it is through the _minutiæ_ 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 legislation, and, still more, administration. The word in which both were summarized was Discipline.

Discipline Calvin himself described as the nerves of religion,[II-63] and the common observation that he assigned to it the same primacy as Luther had given to faith is just. As organized 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 Consistory, 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 importance 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 licentious have no part in the Kingdom of God. He is urged to make sure that “les hommes soient tenus en bonne et honneste discipline,” and to be careful “que ceulx qui oyent la doctrine de l’Evangile s’approuvent estre Chrestiens par sainctité de vie.”[II-64]

“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 Zürich 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 excommunication, which included, in addition to murder and theft, unchastity, perjury and avarice, “especially as it discovers itself in usury and fraud.”[II-65] 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.[II-66] It was in that spirit that he made Geneva 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 considered,” 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 doctrine of the Holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ shall be preserved in its purity, and the Christian Church duly maintained by good government and policy, and also that youth in the future be well and faithfully instructed, and the Hospital 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....”[II-67] The object of it all was so simple. “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 involved the systematic use of torture, the beheading of a child for striking its parents, and the burning of a hundred and fifty heretics in sixty years.[II-68] _Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum._

Torturing and burning were practised elsewhere by Governments 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”[II-69]--was not its merciless intolerance, 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 members, 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.”[II-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 conqueror organizing a new province, not of a suppliant arranging a compromise with a still powerful foe. A system of morals and a code of law lay ready to its hand in the Old Testament. 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 Testament 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 novelty consisted in the religious zeal which was thrown into its application. The organ of administration before which offenders 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 cloth-maker 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 operation.[II-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 Calvin in 1564 to his death in 1605, hardly a year passes without 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 moment, 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 persecutions 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.