To Dr. Charles Gore with affection and gratitude...

The object of this book is to trace some strands in the development of religious thought on social and economic questions in the period which saw the transition from medieval to modern theories of soc...

“Whatever the world thinks, he who hath not much meditated upon God, the human mind, and the summum bonum, may possibly make a thriving earthworm, but will most indubitably make a sorry patriot and a ...

“Que pourrions-nous gagner,” once wrote a celebrated economist, “à recueillir des opinions absurdes, des doctrines décriées, et qui méritent de l’être? Il serait à la fois inutile et fastidieux de les...

We are asking these questions today. Men were asking the same questions, though in different language, throughout the sixteenth century. It is a commonplace that modern economic history begins with a ...

If such ideas were to be more than generalities, they required to be translated into terms of the particular transactions by which trade is conducted and property acquired. Their practical expression ...

Such, in brief outline, was the background of economic thought which the sixteenth century inherited, and which it brought to the bewildering changes in land tenure, in prices, in commercial and finan...

Lord Acton, in an unforgettable passage in his “Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History,” has said that “after many ages persuaded of the headlong decline and impending dissolution of society, and g...

The religious revolution of the age came on a world heaving with the vastest economic crisis that Europe had experienced since the fall of Rome. Art and scientific curiosity and technical skill, learn...

Like the rise of the great industry three centuries later, the economic revolution which accompanied the Renaissance gave a powerful stimulus to speculation. Both in Germany and in England, the Humani...

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 Lut...

The ecclesiastical and political controversies which descend from the sixteenth century have thrust into oblivion all issues of less perennial interest. But the discussions which were motived by chang...

The England of the Reformation, to which posterity turns as a source of high debates on church government and doctrine, was to contemporaries a cauldron seething with economic unrest and social passio...

If a philosophy of society is to be effective, it must be as mobile and realistic as the forces which it would control. The weakness of an attitude which met the onset of insurgent economic interests ...

Though the assertion of the traditional economic ethics continued to be made by one school of churchmen down to the meeting of the Long Parliament, it was increasingly the voice of the past appealing ...

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...

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 ...

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, behin...

“One beam in a dark place,” wrote one who knew the travail of the spirit, “hath exceeding much refreshment in it. Blessed be His name for shining upon so dark a heart as mine.”348 While the revelation...

To applaud certain qualities is by implication to condemn the habits and institutions which appear to conflict with them. The recognition accorded by Puritan ethics to the economic virtues, in an age ...

Societies, like individuals, have their moral crises and their spiritual revolutions. The student can observe the results which these cataclysms produce, but he can hardly without presumption attempt ...

J. B. Say, Cours complet d’Economie politique pratique, vol. VI, 1829, pp. 351⁠–⁠2. ↩ R. Torrens, An Essay on the Production of Wealth, 1821, Preface, p. xiii. ↩ Lloyd George at Portmadoc (Times, June...