ABSTRACT
Secularization of Economic Thought.—The commercial revolution which we have just described was contemporary with an important change in the view that men took of economic activity. In the Middle Ages, as we have seen, economic speculation was deeply tinged by ethics. Life was regarded as a whole, and every branch of human conduct was subject to the laws of Christian morality. Economic phenomena were studied solely in order to discriminate between evil practices and good. The canonist teaching on usury and just price sufficiently illustrates an attitude which persisted till after the Reformation. But the age of the Reformation saw the beginning of a tendency to water down Christian teaching in its application to economic practice. In the seventeenth century, the movement gathered strength and finally triumphed in the eighteenth, when a complete divorce was established between economics and ethics. This victory of the secular spirit was due partly to the growing complexity of the economic organization, which made the prescription of general moral standards increasingly difficult, partly to the tendency, characteristic of Protestantism and especially of Calvinism, to refer all dubious points of morality to the individual conscience. In the end, churchmen, both Catholic and Protestant, came to take up a neutral position in regard to economic activity. From the moral standpoint, money-making in itself was neither good nor bad. Everything depended on the motive with which it was undertaken, and the use made of the wealth when acquired. And these were matters for the individual conscience to settle. At the same time, there was nothing inherently wicked in the pursuit of wealth. The world of business offered as ample a field for the practice of the moral virtues as any other department of life. Moneymaking might be carried on for the greater glory of God. From this it was but a step to the conclusion that ethics and economics were two separate departments of life and thought, having no vital connexion with each other, or as an eighteenth-century writer pithily put it, ‘trade is one thing and religion is another’. 1 The death of the Puritan divine, Richard Baxter (d. 1691), removed the last representative in this country of the traditional Christian attitude towards economics. 2 The next generation of religious teachers, Anglican and Nonconformist alike, completely gave up the attempt to apply moral rules to the conduct of business.
