this and choose the less gainful way, you cross one of the ends of your calling and you refuse to be God's steward ".

It is of course obvious that men who thus felt the tremendous moral and spiritual values at stake in connection with the prosecution of their business would insist upon the largest measure of economic freedom. Unrestricted competition and freedom of trade were necessary implications of an economic philosophy that saw in one's business the instrument for assuring eternal spiritual welfare. There is in fact little difficulty in tracing an intimate and organic relationship between the economic liberalism of seventeenth century England and religious and political liberalism. In time, of course, the Calvinistic scheme of eternal and logically coördinated moral and spiritual values that furnished the inspiration for the struggle for economic as well as for political and religious liberty fell into abeyance. It ceased to function as a justification for the economic or the political status quo. However, as late as the days of Adam Smith it is still possible to trace in his notion of a preëstablished economic harmony, hovering in the background of his doctrine of unrestricted competition inspired by enlightened individual selfishness, a sort of pale and washed-out remnant of the Calvinistic philosophy of business.

It was inevitable that in the course of time the lofty moral and spiritual setting that lent dignity and moral earnestness to the business life of the early Puritan should lose its force. But the mighty fabric of capitalism for which Calvinism to a very large extent lent the ethical and religious sanctions in the days of its weak and uncertain beginnings still persisted and waxed strong and covered the civilized world. The vitality of the structure of capitalism thus served to preserve and perpetuate to a certain extent the economic ideals of Calvinism. But the norms of the Calvinistic ethics of work and of wealth, stripped of their spiritual background, have persisted in a form that makes them harsh, impersonal, and often irrational and anti-social.

The Calvinistic emphasis upon the duty of prosecuting

some

calling" we find still persisting under the modern notion that intense business activity and enterprise are fundamentally necessary to the welfare of society. It has been remarked that "economic self-assertion still remains to most Americans a sort of moral obligation". But the economic self-assertion of the modern business man is for the most part entirely lacking in any saving sense of a larger scheme of values through which business activity might find its meaning and worth. To the critical outsider the bustling world of trade often appears to be little more than a mad hurly-burly of conflicting forces. Certainly business enterprise recognizes no transcendent and far-flung goal of social welfare as its source of inspiration. It is only some such comprehensive scheme of values that can redeem business from the fundamental irrationality that lies at its heart. Because it lacks the moral and spiritual power drawn from a compelling sense of social responsibility, business has remained, since the decay of Puritanism, essentially unmoral. The economists, by accepting the divorce of economics from ethics, threaten to play the rôle of Frankensteins by creating moral monstrosities.

The incentive to accumulation in early Calvinistic ethic was two-fold. There was first the immediate and practical necessity of securing an assured place in the economic order, for economic independence was necessary to the full enjoyment of political and religious freedom. Furthermore, the accumulation of wealth was a token of the divine favor and of moral progress. There was for the early Calvinist no problem of the surplus, for, no matter how great his increased wealth, the responsibility for the faithful administration of this wealth forced him to reinvest it and to utilize it as an additional means for the development of character and the glory of God. To-day the situation is entirely changed. The incentive to business enterprise still persists but the sense of social or religious responsibility which would tend to control the accumulations of wealth and assure its employment in the interest of the common good has to a very large extent disap

peared. There is in fact no more striking evidence of the lack of any great compelling scheme of moral values in our modern business life than just this pressing problem of our surplus wealth.

Perhaps no phase of the Puritan economic philosophy has suffered more from the decay of Calvinism than profitism. For profitism is morally one of the unloveliest phases of modern business life. To be sure, the Puritan ethic and modern business both insist that profits are essential to industry. For the modern man, however, profits rather than a livelihood is the business incentive. Every business move is estimated in terms of its "prospective profit-yielding capacity". Business, then, does not look further than the sheer fact of earning capacity. In so far as profitism is subject to modification it is due to forces that arise outside of business. We seek in vain in the conventional business ethic for any comprehensive moral principle that would provide a check upon profitism in the interest of society as a whole. We have been made painfully aware of this fact in our recent attempts to control the food and fuel profiteers.

Profit in the early Puritan ethic was never looked upon as an end in itself; it could not possibly have been identified with the essence of business. For profits, when legitimate, were viewed as an evidence of a rationally ordered and successful business and one, therefore, that was furthering the moral and spiritual welfare of the individual and of his fellows. Legitimate profits found their measure of values in a lofty and comprehensive ethical scheme, religiously conceived to be sure, but authoritative and socially efficient. For the Puritan profits were, on the one hand, a reward properly earned by effective contributions to the sum total of moral and spiritual values; on the other hand, profits were in a very real sense a form of self-fulfillment. They indicated that the business man was a "workman that needeth not to be ashamed ", so that in a certain sense creative activity in the realm of business took its place side by side with the creations of the artist, scientist, or scholar. It goes without saying that

there is nothing more sadly needed in modern industry than just this socialization of business enterprise and of profits. It alone can save us from the militant, unscrupulous, economic self-assertion that has done so much to brutalize our modern life and to strip it of all enthusiasm for those things that are true and honest and lovely and of good report.

The development of his business and hence the moral welfare of the employer of labor demanded that the Calvinist be able to buy his labor in the cheapest market or one in which there was free competition. The low wage was also thought necessary for the moral good of the worker. For the disciplinary value of work made it necessary to keep wages low so as to force the lazy to undergo the moral discipline of work and to assure the practice of the virtues of thrift and diligence. The only poor recognized in the Puritan ethic were "God Almighty's poor" or the lame and halt and blind. There was no place in the Puritan scheme for any moral justification of the able-bodied poor or the unemployed. It is possible to recognize in modern capitalism's antagonism to union labor and collective bargaining and in its unwillingness to assume any social responsibility for the unemployed an echo of an outworn Puritan ethic.

Calvinism and business have long since parted company. From its very nature and claims Calvinism was unable to adjust itself to the vigorous and expanding industrial order. When men once ceased to take Calvinism seriously, all its detailed regulations of the business life became mere hindrances or were made the vehicles for other sets of values. The ethical significance of work, for example, was undoubtedly one of the noblest contributions of Puritanism to the modern industrial order. But with the rise of surplus wealth and the development of the capitalistic class the virtues of thrift, industry, temperance, and frugality, together with the related virtues of obedience and respect for the existing order of things, came in time to be thought most becoming in the working class. The capitalistic class were exempt.

The economic as well as the political philosophy of Puri

tanism has lingered longest among the middle class, the farmer, the country storekeeper, the small tradesman. At the close of the last century this group, under the leadership of Mr. Bryan, made a last pathetic attempt to bridle the trusts, to restore lost competition, in short to revive the economic philosophy of Calvinism. The scheme was doomed to failure for the reason that Calvinism no longer exists as a vital religious attitude in the hearts of modern men. The husks of its once vigorous and noble spirit are still with us, embalmed to a large extent in the economic, moral, and spiritual fabric of society. But they no longer serve the ends they were designed to serve. They are rather a fruitful source of confusion and uncertainty. The sacrosanct character of private property, unrestricted competition, profitism, economic self-assertion, thrift, the dignity of work, the lofty sense of responsibility for wealth or for positions of power in the economic orderthese and other phases of the economic life that date back to early Calvinism have long since lost their original moral and spiritual background or survive in a social order that is fundamentally alien to the spirit of Richard Baxter or of Jonathan Edwards. The fact that men still cling to this ghost of an outworn moral order, still reverence it and ever and anon still seek in a half-hearted way to vitalize it and make it serve as an instrument of reform is no small factor in the prevailing confusion in ethical ideals. It is at the same time a somewhat pathetic reminder of the lack of a compelling and comprehensive scheme of moral values in our modern life.

§ 5. THE DECAY OF PURITANISM

The forces that finally undermined the hold of institutionalized religion and particularly of Calvinism upon the social conscience were many and diverse. They began to make themselves felt towards the end of the eighteenth century but their full effects were not evident, especially in America, until after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. Up to the beginning of the nineteenth