Max Weber: Selections in Translation

In order to grasp the connexions between the fundamental religious ideas of ascetic Protestantism and its maxims of everyday economic life, it is necessary above all to refer to those theological writings which can be seen to have had their origins in pastoral practice. For, in a time when the next world was everything, when the social position of the Christian depended on his admission to communion, and when the influence exercised by the clergy in the cure of souls, in church discipline and in preaching, was of a kind which (as the merest glance at the collections of ‘consilia’, ‘casus conscientiae’, etc. will show) we modern men simply cannot any longer begin to imagine, the religious forces at work in pastoral practice are the decisive influences in forming ‘national character’.

For the purposes of our discussions in this section, as opposed to later discussions, we may treat ascetic Protestantism as a single undifferentiated whole. But since that kind of English Puritanism which had its roots in Calvinism aftords the most consistent attempt to work out the basis of the idea of the ‘calling’, we may, in accordance with our principle, take one of its representatives as the focus of our discussion. Richard Baxter is distinguished above many other literary representatives of the Puritan ethic by his eminently practical and conciliatory attitude, and also by the universal recognition of his constantly republished and translated works.