168. And, as we have seen, milder forms of the consistent ascetic ethics of Puritanism; while if, in the popular manner, one wished to interpret these religious conceptions as only exponents or reflections of capitalistic institutions, just the opposite would have to be the case.

169. Of the Baptists only the so-called General Baptists go back to the older movement. The Particular Baptists were, as we have pointed out already, Calvinists, who in principle limited Church membership to the reborn, or at least personal believers, and hence remained in principle voluntarists and opponents of any State Church. Under Cromwell, no doubt, they were not always consistent in practice. Neither they nor the General Baptists, however important they are as the bearers of the Baptist tradition, give us any occasion for an especial dogmatic analysis here. That the Quakers, though formally a new foundation of George Fox and his associates, were fundamentally a continuation of the Baptist tradition, is beyond question. The best introduction to their history, including their relations to Baptists and Mennonites, is Robert Barclay, The Inner Life of the Religious Societies of the Commonwealth, 1876. On the history of the Baptists, compare, among others, H. M. Dexter, The True Story of John Smyth, the Re-Baptist, as told by himself and his contemporaries, Boston, 1881 (also J. C. Lang in The Baptist Quarterly Review, 1883, p. 1); J. Murch, A History of the Presb. and Gen. Bapt. Church in the West of England, London, 1835; A. H. Newman, History of the Baptist Church in the U.S., New York, 1894 (Am. Church Hist. Series, vol. 2); Vedder, A Short History of the Baptists, London, 1897; E. B. Bax, Rise and Fall of the Anabaptists, New York, 1902; G. Lorimer, The Baptists in History, 1902; J. A. Seiss, The Baptist System Examined, Lutheran Publication Society, 1902; further material in the Baptist Handbook, London, 1896 ff.; Baptist Manuals, Paris, 1891-93; The Baptist Quarterly Review; and the Bibliotheca Sacra, Oberlin, 1900

The best Baptist library seems to be that of Colgate College in the State of New York. For the history of the Quakers the collection in Devonshire House in London is considered the best (not available to me). The official modern organ of orthodoxy is the American Friend, edited by Professor Jones; the best Quaker history that of Rowntree. In addition: Rufus B. Jones, George Fox, an Autobiography, Phila., 1903; Alton C. Thomas, A History of the Society of Friends in America, Phila., 1895; Edward Grubbe, Social Aspects of the Quaker Faith, London, 1899. Also the copious and excellent biographical literature.

170. It is one of the many merits of Karl Müller's Kirchengeschichte to have given the Baptist movement, great in its way, even though outwardly unassuming, the place it deserved in his work. It had suffered more than any other from the pitiless persecution of all the Churches, because it wished to be a sect in the specific sense of that word. Even after five generations it was discredited before the eyes of all the world by the debacle of the related eschatological experiment in Münster. And, continually oppressed and driven underground, it was long after its origin before it attained a consistent formulation of its religious doctrines. Thus it produced even less theology than would have been consistent with its principles, which were themselves hostile to a specialized development of its faith in God as a science. That was not very pleasing to the older professional theologians, even in its own time, and it made little impression on them. But many more recent ones have taken the same attitude. In Ritschl, Pietismus, 1, pp. 22 f., the rebaptizers are not very adequately, in fact, rather contemptuously, treated. One is tempted to speak of a theological citizen standpoint. That, in spite of the fact that Comelius's fine work (Geschichte des Münsterschen Aufruhrs) had been available for decades.

Here also Ritschl everywhere sees a retrogression from his standpoint toward Catholicism, and suspects direct influences of the radical wing of the Franciscan tradition. Even if such could be proved in a few cases, these threads would be very thin. Above all, the historical fact was probably that the official Catholic Church, wherever the worldly asceticism of the laity went as far as the formation of conventicles, regarded it with the utmost suspicion and attempted to encourage the formation of orders, thus outside the world, or to attach it as asceticism of the second grade to the existing orders and bring it under control. Where this did not succeed, it felt the danger that the practice of subjectivist ascetic morality might lead to the denial of authority and to heresy, just as, and with the same justification, the Elizabethan Church felt toward the half-Pietistic prophesying Bible conventicles, even when their conformism was undoubted; a feeling which was expressed by the Stuarts in their Book of Sports, of which later. The history of numerous heretical movements, including, for instance, the Humiliati and the Beguins, as well as the fate of St. Francis, are the proofs of it. The preaching of the mendicant friars, especially the Franciscans, probably did much to prepare the way for the ascetic lay morality of Calvinist Baptist Protestantism. But the numerous close relationships between the asceticism of Western monasticism and the ascetic conduct of Protestantism, the importance of which must continually be stressed for our particular problems, are based in the last analysis on the fact that important factors are necessarily common to every asceticism on the basis of Biblical Christianity. Furthermore, every asceticism, no matter what its faith, has need of certain tried methods of subduing the flesh.

Of the following sketch it may further be remarked that its brevity is due to the fact that the Baptist ethic is of only very limited importance for the problem considered primarily in this study, the development of the religious background of the citizen idea of the calling. It contributed nothing new whatever to it. The much more important social aspect of the movement must for the present remain untouched. Of the history of the older Baptist movement, we can, from the view-point of our problem, present here only what was later important for the development of the sects in which we are interested: Baptists, Quakers, and, more incidentally, Mennonites.

171. See above [note 92].

172. On their origin and changes, see A. Ritschl in his Gesammelte Aufsätze, pp. 69 f.

173. Naturally the Baptists have always repudiated the designation of a sect. They form the Church in the sense of the Epistle to the Ephesians 5:27. But in our terminology they form a sect not only because they lack all relation to the State. The relation between Church and State of early Christianity was even for the Quakers (Barclay) their ideal; for to them, as to many Pietists, only a Church under the Cross was beyond suspicion of its purity. But the Calvinists as well, faute de mieux, similarly even the Catholic Church in the same circumstances, were forced to favour the separation of Church and State under an unbelieving State or under the Cross. Neither were they a sect, because induction to membership in the Church took place defacto through a contract between the congregation and the candidates. For that was formally the case in the Dutch Reformed communities (as a result of the original political situation) in accordance with the old Church constitution (see v. Hoffmann, Kirchenverfassungsrecht der niederl. Reformierten, Leipzig, 1902).

On the contrary, it was because such a religious community could only be voluntarily organized as a sect, not compulsorily as a Church, if it did not wish to include the unreborn and thus depart from the Early Christian ideal. For the Baptist communities it was an essential of the very idea of their Church, while for the Calvinists it was an historical accident. To be sure, that the latter were also urged by very definite religious motives in the direction of the believers' Church has already been indicated. On the distinction between Church and sect, see the following essay. The concept of sect which I have adopted here has been used at about the same time and, I assume, independently from me, by KaKenbusch in the Realenzyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche (Article Sekte). Troeltsch in his Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen accepts it and discusses it more in detail. See also below, the introduction to the essays on the Sociology of World Religions.

174. How important this symbol was, historically, for the conservation of the Church community, since it was an unambiguous and unmistakable sign, has been very clearly shown by Comelius, op. cit.

175. Certain approaches to it in the Mennonites' doctrine of justification need not concern us here.

176. This idea is perhaps the basis of the religious interest in the discussion of questions like the incarnation of Christ and his relationship to the Virgin Mary, which, often as the sole purely dogmatic part, stands out so strangely in the oldest documents of Baptism (for instance the confessions printed in Comelius, op. cit., Appendix to Vol. 11. On this question, see K. Müller, Kirchengeschichte, 11, 1, p. 330). The difference between the christology of the Reformed Church and the Lutheran (in the doctrine of the so-called communicatio idiomatum) seems to have been based on similar religious interests.

177. It was expressed especially in the original strict avoidance even of everyday intercourse with the excommunicated, a point at which even the Calvinists, who in principle held the opinion that worldly affairs were not affected by spiritual censure, made large concessions. See the following essay.

178. How this principle was applied by the Quakers to seemingly trivial externals (refusal to remove the hat, to kneel, bow, or use formal address) is well known. The basic idea is to a certain extent characteristic of all asceticism. Hence the fact that true asceticism is always hostile to authority. In Calvinism it appeared in the principle that only Christ should rule in the Church. In the case of Pietism one may think of Spener's attempts to find a Biblical justification of titles. Catholic asceticism, so far as ecclesiastical authority was concerned, broke through this tendency in its oath of obedience, by interpreting obedience itself in ascetic terms. The overturning of this principle in Protestant asceticism is the historical basis of the peculiarities of even the contemporary democracy of the peoples influenced by Puritanism as distinct from that of the Latin spirit. It is also part of the historical background of that lack of respect of the American which is, as the case may be, so irritating or so refreshing.

179. No doubt this was true from the beginning for the Baptists essentially only of the New Testament, not to the same extent of the Old. Especially the Sermon on the Mount [Matthew 5. ff.] enjoyed a peculiar prestige as a programme of social ethic in all denominations.

180. Even Schwenkfeld had considered the outward performance of the sacraments an indifference, while the General Baptists and the Mennonites held strictly to Baptism and the Communion, the Mennonites to the washing of feet in addition. On the other hand, for the predestinationists the depreciation, in fact for all except the communion--one may even say the suspicion--in which the sacraments were held, went very far. See the following essay.

181. On this point the Baptist denominations, especially the Quakers (Barclay, Apology for the True Christian Divinity, fourth edition, London, 1701, kindly placed at my disposal by Eduard Bernstein), referred to Calvin's statements in the Institutes, III, p. 2, where in fact quite unmistakable suggestions of Baptist doctrine are to be found. Also the older distinction between the Word of God as that which God had revealed to the patriarchs, the prophets, and the apostles, and the Holy Scriptures as that part of it which they had written down, was, even though there was no historical connection, intimately related to the Baptist conception of revelation. The mechanical idea of inspiration, and with it the strict bibliocracy of the Calvinists, was just as much the product of their development in one direction in the course of the sixteenth century as the doctrine of the inner light of the Quakers, derived from Baptist sources, was the result of a directly opposite development. The sharp differentiation was also in this case partly a result of continual disputes.

182. That was emphasized strongly against certain tendencies of the Socinians. The natural reason knows nothing whatever of God (Barclay, op. cit., p. 102). That meant that the part played by the natural law elsewhere in Protestantism was altered. In principle there could be no general rules, no moral code, for the calling which everyone had, and which is different for every individual, is revealed to him by God through his conscience. We should do, not the good in the general sense of natural reason, but God's will as it is written in our hearts and known through the conscience (Barclay, pp. 73, 76). This irrationality of morality, derived from the exaggerated contrast between the divine and the flesh, is expressed in these fundamental tenets of Quaker ethics: "What a man does contrary to his faith, though his faith may be wrong, is in no way acceptable to God--though the thing might have been lawful to another" (Barclay, p. 487). Of course that could not be upheld in practice. The "moral and perpetual statutes acknowledged by all Christians" are, for instance, for Barclay the limit of toleration. In practice the contemporaries felt their ethic, with certain peculiarities of its own, to be similar to that of the Reformed Pietists. "Everything good in the Church is suspected of being Quakerism" as Spener repeatedly points out. It thus seems that Spener envied the Quakers this reputation. Cons. Theol., 111, 6, 1, Dist. 2, No. 64. The repudiation of oaths on the basis of a passage in the Bible shows that the real emancipation from the Scriptures had not gone far. The significance for social ethics of the principle, "Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you" which many Quakers regarded as the essence of the whole Christian ethics, need not concern us here.

183. The necessity of assuming this possibility Barclay justifies because without it "there should never be a place known by the Saints wherein they might be free of doubting and despair, which--is most absurd". It is evident that the certainty of salvation depends upon it. Thus Barclay, op. cit., p. 20.

184. There thus remains a difference in type between the Calvinistic and the Quaker rationalization of life. But when Baxter formulates it by saying that the spirit is supposed by the Quakers to act upon the soul as on a corpse, while the characteristically formulated Calvinistic principle is "reason and spirit are conjunct principles" (Christian Directory, II, p. 76), the distinction was no longer valid for his time in this form.

185. Thus in the very careful articles "Menno" and "Mennoniten" by Cramer in the Realenzyklopädie Jir Protestantische Theologie und Kirche, especially p. 604. However excellent these articles are, the article "Baptisten" in the same encyclopedia is not very penetrating and in part simply incorrect. Its author does not know, for instance, the Publications of the Hanserd Knolly's Society, which are indispensable for the history of Baptism.

186. Thus Barclay, op. cit., p. 404, explains that eating, drinking, and acquisition are natural, not spiritual acts, which may be performed without the special sanction of God. The explanation is in reply to the characteristic objection that if, as the Quakers teach, one cannot pray without a special motion of the Spirit, the same should apply to ploughing. It is, of course, significant that even in the modern resolutions of Quaker Synods the advice is sometimes given to retire from business after acquiring a sufficient fortune, in order, withdrawn from the bustle of the world, to be able to live in devotion to the Kingdom of God alone. But the same idea certainly occurs occasionally in other denominations, including Calvinism. That betrays the fact that the acceptance of the citizen practical ethics by these movements was the worldly application of an asceticism which had originally fled from the world.

187. Veblen in his suggestive book The Theory of Business Enterprise is of the opinion that this motto belongs only to early capitalism. But economic supermen, who, like the present captains of industry, have stood beyond good and evil, have always existed, and the statement is still true of the broad underlying strata of business men.

188. We may here again expressly call attention to the excellent remarks of Eduard Bemstein, op. cit. To Kautsky's highly schematic treatment of the Baptist movement and his theory of heretical communism in general (in the first volume of the same work) we shall return on another occasion.

189. "In civil actions it is good to be as the many, in religious to be as the best" says, for example, Thomas Adams (Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 138). That sounds somewhat more drastic man it is meant to be. It means that the Puritan honesty is formalistic legality, just as the uprightness which the sometime Puritan people like to claim as a national virtue is something specifically different from the German Ehrlichkeit. Some good remarks on the subject from the educational standpoint may be found in the Preuss. Jahrb., CXII (1903), p. 226. The formalism of the Puritan ethic is in turn the natural consequence of its relation to the law.

190. Something is said on this in the following essay.

191. This is the reason for the economic importance of the ascetic Protestant, but not Catholic, minorities.

192. That the difference of dogmatic basis was not inconsistent with the adoption of the most important interest in proof is to be explained in the last analysis by the historical peculiarities of Christianity in general which cannot be discussed here.

193. "Since God hath gathered us to be a people" says Barclay, op. cit., p. 357. I myself heard a Quaker sermon at Haverford Collegewhich laid great emphasis on the interpretation of saints as meaning separate.