“And the Lorde was with Joseph, and he was a luckie felowe.”
Genesis xxxix. 2 (Tyndale’s translation).
By the end of the sixteenth century the divorce between religious theory and economic realities had long been evident. But in the meantime, within the bosom of religious theory itself, 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 on 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 signifies 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 haughty 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 considerable advantage, regarded “merely in a commercial view.”[1] 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 unknown, as well as of mundane ambitions and commonplace cupidities, was one in which, since “Thorough” was no more, since property was secure, and contracts inviolable, and the executive tamed, the judicious investments of business men were likely to yield 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.
The principal streams which descended in England from the teaching of Calvin were three—Presbyterianism, Congregationalism, and a doctrine of the nature of God and 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 freedom of all Churches from the interference of the State, was to leave, alike in the Old World and in the New, an imperishable 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 minutiæ of personal behavior.
The growth, triumph and transformation of the Puritan spirit was the most fundamental movement of the seventeenth century. Puritanism, not the Tudor secession from Rome, was the true 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 high 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 Parliaments 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.
In the mysticism of Bunyan and Fox, in the brooding melancholy and glowing energy of Cromwell, in the victorious tranquillity of Milton, “unshaken, unseduced, unterrified,” 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 sacramentalism, mundane toil becomes itself a kind of sacrament. Like a man who strives by unresting activity to exorcise a haunting 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 institutions 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, salvation and damnation. “It made the world seem to me,” said a Puritan of his conversion, “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 Kingdom 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 powers 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. Amusements, 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 eternal 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, exhortation 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 intellect; 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 pulpit. 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,”[5] he is a natural republican, 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 mastery 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 compressed 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 social 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 income, 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 different types of religious experience correspond to the varying 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 independence, 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 somewhat arrogant contempt for those who, either through weakness 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 decentralization 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 extremes 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 estimate 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 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 profounder 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.”[11]
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 accompany 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 corporations, and thereby poysoning whole counties.”[12] In Lancashire, the clothing towns—“the Genevas of Lancashire”—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 Puritanism.
The identification of the industrial and commercial classes with religious radicalism was, indeed, a constant theme of 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 corporations, 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 tradesmen.”[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 fashion, its practitioners were moved by the experience of the last half-century and by the example of Holland—the economic schoolmaster of seventeenth-century Europe—to inquire, in the manner of any modern sociologist, into the relations 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 religious tolerance. Serenely indifferent to its spiritual significance, 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 uniformity 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 multitude 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 long been elastic enough to swallow Flemish weavers flying from Alva, and Huguenots driven from France. But the traditional ecclesiastical system was not equally accommodating. It found not only the alien refugee, but its home-bred sectaries, indigestible. Laud, reversing the policy of Elizabethan Privy Councils, which characteristically thought diversity of trades more important than unity of religion, had harassed the settlements of foreign artisans at Maidstone, Sandwich and Canterbury,[16] 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.”[17] 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 enunciated the healing principle that persecution was incompatible with prosperity, since it was on the pioneers of economic progress that persecution principally fell. “Every law of this nature,” wrote the author of a pamphlet on the subject, is not only “expressly against the very principles and 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 employing ten times the number of people we now have.”[19]
Temple, in his calm and lucid study of the United Netherlands, 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] “There is a kind of natural unaptness,” wrote a pamphleteer in 1671, “in 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 holding idleness unlawful.... The domestic interest of England lieth in the advancement of trade by removing all obstructions 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 same odious creed, the maxim that “religion ought to make no distinction between Protestants” and the policy “of preferring, 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 corporations” still figured in the pamphlets of the statesman 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 proletariat 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 magistrates 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 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 businesses, 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 young 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 compounded 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 shouldered 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 Puritanism, 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 applied 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 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 apprehension 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 tender 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 decay. They keep many of the nobility and gentry in perfect vassalage (as their poor copyholders), which eclipses honour, enervates justice and oft-times protects them in their boldest conceptions. By engrossing 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.”[28]
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 century had felt authority and prestige slipping from its grasp, and which could only maintain its hold on them by resigning 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, successful and, according to its lights, not too unscrupulous, generation for a class of fainéants, unversed in the new learning of the City and incompetent to the verge of immorality in the management of business affairs. Their triumphs in the past, their strength in the present, their confidence in the future, their faith in themselves, and their difference from their feebler neighbours—a difference as of an iron wedge in a lump of clay—made them, to use a modern 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 conflict 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 it; 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 increased to that degree that we were the exchange of Christendom ... 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 sternness, 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 men, and such as believe that labor and industry is their duty towards God.”[31] Then an air stirred and the glass was dimmed. It was long before any questioned it again.
Puritanism was the schoolmaster of the English middle classes. It heightened their virtues, sanctified, without eradicating, their convenient vices, and gave them an inexpugnable assurance that, behind virtues and vices alike, stood the majestic and inexorable laws of an omnipotent Providence, without whose foreknowledge not a hammer could beat upon the forge, not a figure could be added to the ledger. But it is a strange school which does not teach more than one lesson, and the social reactions of Puritanism, trenchant, permanent and profound, are not to be summarized 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 capitalism, and Troeltsch, Schulze-Gaevernitz and Cunningham have lent to the same interpretation the weight of their considerable authority.[32] But the heart of man holds mysteries of contradiction which live in vigorous incompatibility 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 individualist, 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 common 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 discipline, 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 together, 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; the metal cooled in the mould; and the Puritan spirit, shorn of its splendors and its illusions, settled finally into its decent bed of equable 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 problem is to grasp their connection, and to understand the reasons 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 employment of money.”[33] That it swept away the restrictions imposed by the existing machinery is true; neither ecclesiastical 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 individualism 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 Scotland, England and France. Knox produced a Scottish edition of it; Cartwright, Travers and Udall composed treatises expounding it. Bancroft exposed its perils for the established ecclesiastical order.[34] The word “discipline” implied essentially “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 London described their objects as not merely the “free and pure” preaching of the Gospel, nor the pure ministration of the sacraments, but “to have, not the fylthye cannon lawe, but disciplyne onelye and altogether agreeable to the same heavenlye and Allmightye word of our good Lorde Jesus Chryste,”[36] 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.[37]
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 reëmerged in the system of church government which the supercilious Scotch Commissioners at the Westminster Assembly steered to inconclusive 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.”[38] 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 provided 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 triumph of the army, prevented it, Mr. Shaw thinks, from functioning longer.[39]
“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 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 countenance a laxity welcome only to worldlings. Knewstub appealed 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 professorship, 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 penitence.[41] The ideal of all was that expressed in the apostolic injunction to be content with a modest competence and to shun the allurements 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 standpoint was Ames’ De Conscientia, a manual of Christian conduct which was intended to supply the brethren with the practical guidance which had been offered in the Middle Ages by such works as Dives et Pauper. It became a standard 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 experience 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 interest 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 market price and “the judgment of prudent and good men.” They must not take advantage of the necessities of individual 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 conscience, 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 prescribed 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 usurious—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 punished 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 resorting 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 mutatus!) took these economic lapses seriously. It decided in 1647, after considerable debate, that “usury is a scandalous 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 faithfull to that trust. You are postinge to the grave every day; you dwell uppon the borders of eternity; your breath is in your nostrells; therfore duble and treble your resolutions to bee zealous in a good thinge.... How dreadfull 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 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 eloquent 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 reform, 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 privilege, 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 individualism 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 Democratic 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 rooted to be exorcised merely by political changes, or even by the more corroding march of economic development. Expelled 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 conveyed to their audiences by teaching and preaching or not at all. Of those champions the most learned, the most practical, and the most persuasive was Richard Baxter.
How Baxter endeavored to give practical instruction to 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 proposed what doubts any of them had about the sermon, or any other case of conscience, and I resolved their doubts.”[50] Both in form and in matter, his Christian Directory, or a Summ of Practical Theologie and Cases of Conscience[51] is a remarkable book. It is, in essence, a Puritan Summa Theologica and Summa Moralis in one; its method of treatment descends directly from that of the medieval Summæ, 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 reducing of theoretical knowledge into serious Christian practice.” Divided into four parts, Ethics, Economics, Ecclesiastics, and Politics, it has as its purpose to establish the rules of a Christian casuistry, which may be sufficiently detailed 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 treatment of similar questions by previous writers, both before and after the Reformation, and Baxter is conscious of continuing a great tradition. But it is, above all things, realistic, 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 opening 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 cultivation of which an opportunity is offered by the life of business. It takes as its starting-point the commercial environment 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 morally responsible, not as the result of an impersonal mechanism, 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 oppressing 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 extortion 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 more, he “must not make too great an advantage of his convenience or desire, but be glad that [he] can pleasure him upon equal, fair, and honest terms,” for “it is a false rule of them that think their commodity is worth as much as any one will give.” If the seller foresees 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 foresees that they will rise, he may hold his wares back, but only—a somewhat embarrassing exception—if it be not “to the hurt of the Commonwealth, as if ... keeping it in be the cause of the dearth, and ... bringing 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 between 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 discipline 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, “from the temptations of poverty and riches,”[52] Baxter had naturally strong views as to the ethics of landowning. Significantly enough, he deals with them under the general rubric of “Cases of oppression, especially of tenants,” oppression 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 county, 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 Baxter’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 market: “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 families, 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 effect on the tenants, or evict his tenants without compensating them, and in such a way as to cause depopulation; nor must a newcomer take a holding over the sitting tenant’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 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 conclusions, as a medieval Schoolman, and he differs from one of the later Doctors, like St. Antonino, hardly more than St. Antonino himself had differed from Aquinas. Seven years later Bunyan published The Life and Death of Mr. 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 fall into their mouths,” and “of those vile wretches called pawnbrokers, that lend money and goods to poor people, who are by necessity forced to such an inconvenience, and will make by one trick or another 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 remembered 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 “wickedness, as in selling too dear, so in buying too cheap.”[53] Brother Berthold of Regensburg had said the same four 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 compartment with laws of its own, if more ancient than is often supposed, did not win so painless 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 Catholics, 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 opposition 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 fundamental question, after all, is not what kind of rules a faith enjoins, but what type of character it esteems and cultivates. To the scheme of Christian ethics which offered admonitions against the numberless disguises assumed by the sin which sticketh fast between buying and selling, the Puritan character offered, not direct opposition, but a polished surface on which these ghostly admonitions could find no enduring foothold. The rules of Christian morality elaborated by Baxter 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 spirit” 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 discipline, 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 restrictions 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 changing 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 morality or of 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 transformation. 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 of an almost Utilitarian individualism. 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.