The New Christianity; or, The Religion of the New Age

by Salem Goldworth Bland

II. The bourgeois or plutocratic or capitalistic phase, A.D. 1500-1914.

Gradually, however, there arose in the aristocratically organized middle age a new power. This was the trading and manufacturing classes. As soon as the feudal nobility gave any measure of security, and much more extensively when kings grew strong enough to stretch the royal power over their turbulent feudatories, the irrepressible trading instinct asserted itself. English wool found its way to Flanders, French wine to England, the silks and spices and gems of the East to Europe. Busy and wealthy cities sprang up in districts favorable for manufacture and along the great trade routes between East and West. Kings, eager to assert their sovereignty over the anarchic barons, allied themselves with this new burgher class, which was on its part glad to support a power that promised it deliverance from such very imperfect and costly protectors as the feudal lords had shown themselves to be.

The Crusades, especially, stimulated trade and in the nearly two centuries (A.D. 1096-1270) during which the crusading spirit was active, the most notable feature of the social evolution of Europe was the rise of the towns.

The rise of the towns meant the liberation of the people. No buildings in Europe have more sacred associations than the old city halls of the medieval cities of the Low Countries, France, and Germany. They were the birth place of modern freedom.

Trade loves freedom and abhors all restrictions except such as are sometimes short-sightedly imposed by itself. The towns, wearied of the exactions of their castellated tyrants, won their freedom by purchase or by fighting, or co-operated with the king in reducing the barons to some measure of good behavior.

During the last five hundred years, and especially since the Industrial Revolution effected by the use of machinery, the merchant and manufacturing classes have been steadily climbing into power. They have superseded or absorbed the pre-existing aristocracy. The old families have died out or been transformed by a profitable and strengthening admixture of rich plebeians. The bulk of even such an imposing aristocracy as that of Britain is composed of creations of the last two or three generations, and these so largely from the ranks of wealthy brewers that there is truth as well as wit in the saying that the British peerage is the British beerage. The sale of titles at the price of large contributions to political funds is admitted and defended. Even in Great Britain, with its impressive array of ancient names, aristrocracy has been largely converted into plutocracy.

In a constitutionally democratic nation like the United States there is no other aristocracy.

Now, if Church and State undergo a parallel development and re-act in the same way to conditions governing them both alike, what we might expect to find would be that, with the growing ascendancy in the social structure of the trading and manufacturing class (or to use a single term, though unfortunately one with a flavor of resentment about it, bourgeoisie), there would be a parallel ascendancy of the same class in the Church.

This is exactly what we do find. The aristocratic form of Christianity, which fitted into the feudalistic age, which was called for by the social conditions of that age, which was, indeed, probably, the only kind of Christianity that could have existed in that age, did not suit the freedom-loving, self-reliant, self-asserting, ambitious burghers. They resented the control which the clergy exercised over them, alike when it was well-meant and when it was selfish and tyrannical. Especially they resented the enormous sums which were extracted from them by the fees and taxes of priests, bishops, and the Papal Court at Rome. They resented, too, the Church's prohibition of interest. This condemnation, based on the Mosaic prohibition of interest, had not been found so unfair or vexatious prior to the sixteenth century when money was borrowed mainly for unproductive consumption, as for example, for war and for extravagance. Now when, in the great commercial development of that century, money was being borrowed for business with the prospect, almost the certainty, of profit, and interest became merely the sharing of profits, the Church's refusal of absolution to those guilty of taking interest was a serious factor in the growing hostility between the cities and the Church.

The Church, moreover, favoured sumptuary laws,--the minute regulation of purchases and prices. As this well-meant legislation tended to restrict trade, it was disliked by the traders.