The practical application of these generalities to business is set out in the numerous works composed to expound the rules of Christian conduct in the varied relations of life. If one may judge by their titles—Navigation Spiritualized, Husbandry Spiritualized, The Religious Weaver[[85]]—there must have been a considerable demand for books conducive to professional edification. A characteristic specimen is The Tradesman’s Calling,[[86]] by Richard Steele. The author, after being deprived of a country living under the Act of Uniformity, spent his declining years as minister of a congregation at Armourers Hall in London, and may be presumed to have understood the spiritual requirements of the City in his day, when the heroic age of Puritanism was almost over and enthusiasm was no longer a virtue. No one who was writing a treatise on economic ethics today would address himself primarily to the independent shopkeeper, as the figure most representative of the business community, and Steele’s book throws a flood of light on the problems and outlook of the bourgeoisie, in an age before the center of economic gravity had shifted from the substantial tradesman to the exporting merchant, the industrial capitalist and the financier.
Like Baxter, he is acquainted with the teaching of earlier authorities as to equity in bargaining. He is doubtful, however, of its practical utility. Obvious frauds in matters of quality and weight are to be avoided; an honest tradesman ought not to corner the market, or “accumulate two or three callings merely to increase his riches,” or oppress the poor; nor should he seek more than “a reasonable proportion of gain,” or “lie on the catch to make [his] markets of others’ straits.” But Steele rejects as useless in practice the various objective standards of a reasonable profit—cost of production, standard of life, customary prices—which had been suggested in earlier ages, and concludes that the individual must judge for himself. “Here, as in many other cases, an upright conscience must be the clerk of the market.”
In reality, however, the characteristic of The Tradesman’s Calling, as of the age in which it was written, is not the relics of medieval doctrine which linger embalmed in its guileless pages, but the robust common sense, which carries the author lightly over traditional scruples on a tide of genial, if Philistine, optimism. For his main thesis is a comfortable one—that there is no necessary conflict between religion and business. “Prudence and Piety were always very good friends.... You may gain enough of both worlds if you would mind each in its place.” His object is to show how that agreeable result may be produced by dedicating business—with due reservations—to the service of God, and he has naturally little to say on the moral casuistry of economic conduct, because he is permeated by the idea that trade itself is a kind of religion. A tradesman’s first duty is to get a full insight into his calling, and to use his brains to improve it. “He that hath lent you talents hath also said, ‘Occupy till I come!’ Your strength is a talent, your parts are talents, and so is your time. How is it that ye stand all the day idle?... Your trade is your proper province.... Your own vineyard you should keep.... Your fancies, your understandings, your memories ... are all to be laid out therein.” So far from their being an inevitable collision between the requirements of business and the claims of religion, they walk hand in hand. By a fortunate dispensation, the virtues enjoined on Christians—diligence, moderation, sobriety, thrift—are the very qualities most conducive to commercial success. The foundation of all is prudence; and prudence is merely another name for the “godly wisdom [which] comes in and puts due bounds” to his expenses, “and teaches the tradesman to live rather somewhat below than at all above his income.” Industry comes next, and industry is at once expedient and meritorious. It will keep the tradesman from “frequent and needless frequenting of taverns,” and pin him to his shop, “where you may most confidently expect the presence and blessing of God.”
If virtue is advantageous, vice is ruinous. Bad company, speculation, gambling, politics, and “a preposterous zeal” in religion—it is these things which are the ruin of tradesmen. Not, indeed, that religion is to be neglected. On the contrary, it “is to be exercised in the frequent use of holy ejaculations.” What is deprecated is merely the unbusinesslike habit of “neglecting a man’s necessary affairs upon pretence of religious worship.” But these faults, common and uncommon alike, are precisely those to be avoided by the sincere Christian, who must not, indeed, deceive or oppress his neighbor, but need not fly to the other extreme, be righteous over-much, or refuse to “take the advantage which the Providence of God puts into his hands.” By a kind of happy, preëstablished harmony, such as a later age discovered between the needs of society and the self-interest of the individual, success in business is in itself almost a sign of spiritual grace, for it is a proof that a man has labored faithfully in his vocation, and that “God has blessed his trade.” “Nothing will pass in any man’s account except it be done in the way of his calling.... Next to the saving his soul, [the tradesman’s] care and business is to serve God in his calling, and to drive it as far as it will go.”
When duty was so profitable, might not profit-making be a duty? Thus argued the honest pupils of Mr. Gripeman, the schoolmaster of Love-gain, a market-town in the county of Coveting in the north.[[87]] The inference was illogical, but how attractive! When the Rev. David Jones was so indiscreet as to preach at St. Mary Woolnoth in Lombard Street a sermon against usury on the text, “The Pharisees who were covetous heard all these things and they derided Christ,” his career in London was brought to an abrupt conclusion.[[88]]
The springs of economic conduct lie in regions rarely penetrated by moralists, and to suggest a direct reaction of theory on practice would be paradoxical. But, if the circumstances which determine that certain kinds of conduct shall be profitable are economic, those which decide that they shall be the object of general approval are primarily moral and intellectual. For conventions to be adopted with whole-hearted enthusiasm, to be not merely tolerated, but applauded, to become the habit of a nation and the admiration of its philosophers, the second condition must be present as well as the first. The insistence among men of pecuniary motives, the strength of economic egotism, the appetite for gain—these are the commonplaces of every age and need no emphasis. What is significant is the change of standards which converted a natural frailty into a resounding virtue. After all, it appears, a man can serve two masters, for—so happily is the world disposed—he may be paid by one, while he works for the other. Between the old-fashioned denunciation of uncharitable covetousness and the new-fashioned applause of economic enterprise, a bridge is thrown by the argument which urges that enterprise itself is the discharge of a duty imposed by God.
In the year 1690 appeared a pamphlet entitled A Discourse of Trade, by N. B., M.D.[[89]] Notable for its enlightened discussion of conventional theories of the balance of trade, it is a good specimen of an indifferent genus. But its authorship was more significant than its argument. For N. B. was Dr. Nicholas Barbon; and Dr. Nicholas Barbon, currency expert, pioneer of insurance, and enthusiast for land-banks, was the son of that Praise-God Barebones, by the parody of whose alluring surname a cynical posterity recorded its verdict on the brief comedy of the Rule of the Saints over Laodicean Englishmen. The reaction from Puritan rigor to Restoration license is the most familiar of platitudes. The reaction to a mundane materialism was more gradual, more general, and ultimately of greater significance. The profligacy of the courtier had its decorous counterpart in the economic orgies of the tradesman and the merchant. Votaries, not of Bacchus, but of a more exacting and more profitable divinity, they celebrated their relief at the discredit of a too arduous idealism, by plunging with redoubled zest into the agreeable fever of making and losing money.
The transition from the anabaptist to the company promoter was less abrupt than might at first sight be supposed. It had been prepared, however unintentionally, by Puritan moralists. In their emphasis on the moral duty of untiring activity, on work as an end in itself, on the evils of luxury and extravagance, on foresight and thrift, on moderation and self-discipline and rational calculation, they had created an ideal of Christian conduct, which canonized as an ethical principle the efficiency which economic theorists were preaching as a specific for social disorders. It was as captivating as it was novel. To countless generations of religious thinkers, the fundamental maxim of Christian social ethics had seemed to be expressed in the words of St. Paul to Timothy: “Having food and raiment, let us be therewith content. For the love of money is the root of all evil.” Now, while, as always, the world battered at the gate, a new standard was raised within the citadel by its own defenders. The garrison had discovered that the invading host of economic appetites was, not an enemy, but an ally. Not sufficiency to the needs of daily life, but limitless increase and expansion, became the goal of the Christian’s efforts. Not consumption, on which the eyes of earlier sages had been turned, but production, became the pivot of his argument. Not an easy-going and open-handed charity, but a systematic and methodical accumulation, won the meed of praise that belongs to the good and faithful servant. The shrewd, calculating commercialism which tries all human relations by pecuniary standards, the acquisitiveness which cannot rest while there are competitors to be conquered or profits to be won, the love of social power and hunger for economic gain—these irrepressible appetites had evoked from time immemorial the warnings and denunciations of saints and sages. Plunged in the cleansing waters of later Puritanism, the qualities which less enlightened ages had denounced as social vices emerged as economic virtues. They emerged as moral virtues as well. For the world exists not to be enjoyed, but to be conquered. Only its conqueror deserves the name of Christian. For such a philosophy, the question, “What shall it profit a man?” carries no sting. In winning the world, he wins the salvation of his own soul as well.
The idea of economic progress as an end to be consciously sought, while ever receding, had been unfamiliar to most earlier generations of Englishmen, in which the theme of moralists had been the danger of unbridled cupidity, and the main aim of public policy had been the stability of traditional relationships. It found a new sanction in the identification of labor and enterprise with the service of God. The magnificent energy which changed in a century the face of material civilization was to draw nourishment from that temper. The worship of production and ever greater production—the slavish drudgery of the millionaire and his unhappy servants—was to be hallowed by the precepts of the same compelling creed.
Social development moves with a logic whose inferences are long delayed, and the day of these remoter applications had not yet dawned. The version of Christian ethics expounded by Puritanism in some of its later phases was still only in its vigorous youth. But it sailed forward on a flowing tide. It had an unconscious ally in the preoccupation with economic interests which found expression in the enthusiasm of business politicians for a commercial Machtpolitik. The youthful Commonwealth, a rival of Holland “for the fairest mistress in the world—trade,”[[90]] was not two years old when it made its own essay in economic imperialism. “A bare-faced war” for commerce, got up by the Royal African Company, was Clarendon’s verdict[[91]] on the Dutch war of 1665-7. Five years later, Shaftesbury hounded the City against Holland with the cry of Delenda est Carthago. The war finance of the Protectorate had made it necessary for Cromwell to court Dutch and Jewish, as well as native, capitalists, and the impecunious Government of the Restoration was in the hands of those syndicates of goldsmiths whose rapacity the Chancellor, a survivor from the age before the deluge, when aristocrats still despised the upstart plutocracy, found not a little disgusting.[[92]]