The Puritan Work Ethic Revisited

The Puritan Work Ethic RevisitedAuthor(s): Paul SeaverSource: Journal of British Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Spring, 1980), pp. 35-53Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The North American Conference on BritishStudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/175492 .

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The Puritan Work Ethic Revisited PAUL SEAVER

Whether Puritanism gave rise to a "work ethic," and, if so, what the nature of that ethic was, has been a source of controversy since Max Weber

published The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism more than

seventy years ago. Experienced polemicists have waged international wars of words over its terms, and tyros have won their spurs in the battle.1 With repect to England, there is at present no agreement either about the

reality of a peculiarly Puritan work ethic or about the impact, if any, that such an ethic might have had on the attitudes and behavior of the emerging capitalist bourgeoisie, if such a species indeed existed as a distinctive social class or group in the early modern period. In fact, since perfectly sane and competent historians have questioned on the one hand, whether "Puritanism" is more than a neo-idealist reification of a nonentity, and on the other, whether the early modern middle class is more than a myth, it

might be the better part of wisdom to inter the remains of these vexed

questions as quietly as possible.2 What follows is not a perverse attempt to

flog a dead horse, if it is dead and a horse, but rather on the basis of a different perspective and different evidence to resurrect a part of what

Timothy Breen has called "the non-existent controversy."3 Since the early 1960s, historians who have concerned themselves with

the controversy at all have largely argued over two issues:4 first, whether

The research for this study was made possible in part by a summer grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

1 See, for example, the bibliography in Robert W. Green, ed., Protestantism and Capitalism. The Weber Thesis and Its Critics (Boston, 1959), pp. 115-16.

2 For the argument that the use of the term "Puritanism" implies a neo-idealist reification, see C.H. George, "Puritanism as History and Historiography," Past and Present, no. 41 (1968), pp. 77-104, esp. 97-100; see also G.R. Elton's comments in a review, Hist. Journ. xvii (1974)214. For the muddle over the middle class, see J.H. Hexter, "The Myth of the Middle Class in Tudor England," Reappraisals in History (London, 1961), pp. 71-116. For a more fruitful approach to the complexities of London society, which avoids the kind of broad generalizations Hexter warned against, see for example, Robert Brenner, "The Social Basis of English Commercial Expansion, 1550-1650," Journ. of Econ. Hist. xxxii(1972):361-84, and Robert Lang, "Social Origins and Social Aspirations of Jacobean London Merchants," Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd s., xxvii(1974):28-47.

3 Timothy Hall Breen, "The Non-existent Controversy: Puritan and Anglican Attitudes on Work and Wealth, 1600-1640," Church History 35(1966):273-87.

4 David Little's Religion, Order, and Law (New York, 1969) is an obvious exception to my generalization, since he embarks on a sophisticated reconsideration of Weber's thesis, a considerably more complex task than that implied by my two issues.



JOURNAL OF BRITISH STUDIES

any late Elizabethan or early Stuart Englishmen espoused a socioeconomic ethic, a position on the doctrine of the calling, on the dignity and necessity of labor, and on the accumulation of riches that is peculiarly Puritan, as distinct from generally Protestant; and second, assuming that there is a position on these issues that is identifiably Puritan, whether it provided more aid and comfort to the expression of the entrepreneurial spirit or appetite than that provided by the spokesmen for the non-Puritan Estab- lishment. In 1964, Christopher Hill suggested that "the Puritan ministers' special emphasis on the duty of working hard," on "the dignity of labor," and more generally on "puritan asceticism," appealed to "industrious artisans and aspiring peasants"-"to those smaller employers and self- employed men ... for whom frugality and hard work might make all the difference between prosperity and failure to survive in the world of growing competition."5 Three years before Hill's Society and Puritanism appeared, Charles and Katherine George had argued that, while no distinctively Puritan position could be identified, the general English Protestant "doctrine of the calling" not only abolished the traditional "medieval and Roman Catholic moral hierarchy of vocations," but also incorporated "the most outgoing and positive view of work which exists in the Christian tradition."6

Contrary to the implications of both these positions, Laura O'Connell has recently suggested that a "full blown appreciation of capitalism" does not appear until "the post-restoration period," and that the earlier Puritan "cast of mind" was "precapitalist" and "equated entrepreneurial activity with covetousness."7 In much the same vein, Bernard Bailyn in his study of New England merchants refers to the "medieval social teachings of ortho- dox Puritanism."8 On the other hand, while not expressing the particular traditionalism of Puritan thought on these matters, Timothy Breen has argued that "all Englishmen held common ideas about work and wealth in the early part of the seventeenth century," the one clear exception being the Laudian Henry Hammond, who suggested both that poverty might well be God's punishment for sin, and that improving one's station in life was not "unlawful for a Christian."9 Henry Hammond, it might be argued, represented the wave of the future, for as John Sommerville noted in a recent article, it was the "moderate Anglicans" after 1660 who "turned out to be the most concerned with the sins of the flesh, with ascetic practices as a means of appeasing God, and oddly enough, with the 'Puritan ethic' of

5 Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (Lon- don, 1964), pp. 134, 138.

6 Charles H. and Katherine George, The Protestant Mind of the English Reforma- tion, 1570-1640 (Princeton, 1961), p. 143.

7 "Anti-Entrepreneurial Attitudes in Elizabethan Sermons and Popular Litera- ture," Journ. ofBritish Studies, xv (Spring, 1976):20.

8 The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1955; Torchbook edition, New York, 1964), p. 39.

9 "The Non-existent Controversy: Puritan and Anglican Attitudes on Work and Wealth, 1600-1640," Church History, xxxv(1966):287, 281, 286.

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THE PURITAN WORK ETHIC REVISITED

work as a religious duty."'0 In effect, Hill's position has been turned upon its head: the Puritan preachers now appear as traditionalists, if not abso- lutely reactionary, in their medieval equation of economic ambition with greed and covetousness; and the later seventeenth- century Anglicans are cast as the first apologists on this acquisitive, entrepreneurial spirit."

Such propositions are not inherently unlikely: they would be congruent, for example, with Sears McGee's conclusion that the Puritans focused more upon their First Table duties, while their Anglican brethren gave more attention to the social ethics of the Second Table.12 If Hill is wrong and Breen and O'Connell right, however, then those of us who supposed that early seventeenth-century London possessed a powerful lay Puritan community, composed largely of the "middling sort"-artisans, shopkeepers, and merchants outside the privileged, monopolistic companies- face some interesting problems,13 for we are confronted with an apparent paradox: Puritan lay vestries, composed largely of the "middling sort," sponsored, financed, and protected Puritan preachers who, on those occasions when they touched on social ethics, preached an anti-entrepreneurial, anti-accumulative economics. Such an apparent paradox, if true, poses some curious possibilities, which merit further examination.

It is possible, of course, that the London audiences of the Puritan preachers accepted that part of the sermon message that suited their spiritual needs and ignored those strictures that sought to limit certain of their economic practices. All students of the history of the "Christian" West are well aware of the capacity of overtly Christian communities to ignore or disregard much of the Gospel message much of the time, and it may well be that the case in point involving lay Londoners is simply a parochial example of that general tendency. Basically this is the argument that Christopher Hill advances in his article on "William Perkins and the Poor," in which he concludes that "the fundamental concepts of Puritan thought are bourgeois," and that "Perkins is the key figure in the system- ization of English Puritanism."'4 After quoting such phrases from Perkins as that beggars are "[for the most part] a cursed generation," and that "men are to be honored for their riches," Hill then admits that he has been quoting selectively, "for in each case Perkins qualifies heavily by insisting that riches are good as they are used, that men must desire them to glorify

10 "Religious Typologies and Popular Religion in Restoration England," Church History, xlv(1976):37.

11 For a radically different perspective, see C.H. George, "The Making of the English Bourgeoisie," Science and Society, xxxv (1971):385-414. If Professor George is correct, it is the seventeenth-century theorists who equate private interest and public good and champion the absolute rights of private property, who signal the coming triumph of the bourgeoisie.

12 The Godly Man in Stuart England (New Haven, 1976), passim. 13 See, for example, P.S. Seaver, The Puritan Lectureships, 1560-1662 (Stanford,

1970); W.K. Jordan, The Charities ofLondon, 1480-1660 (London, 1960); and Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution (London, 1976).

14 Puritanism and Revolution (London, 1958), p. 238.

37




God, not for themselves,"15 Hill adds, however, and this is his crucial point, that he suspects "that many good bourgeois in the congregations of Perkins and his followers would follow the same principles of selection" and emerge from church with "the new concessions ... noted, and the traditional qualifications ... forgotten."16 If Hill is correct, and there is nothing inherently improbable about his thesis, it is conceivable that both he and his critics are right, and the contradiction posited between what the laity heard and what they in fact did disappears. The only difficulty lies in proving that such selectivity was indeed the case, for few men are likely to leave us unambiguous evidence that they only heard or read what it was socially and economically convenient for them to hear or read.

A second solution to the apparent paradox might be premised less on the unconscious hypocrisy of Puritan congregations than on the possibility that many of the London Puritans existed in a state of perpetual anxiety over the apparent tension between their ethical values and their actual behavior. Michael Walzer has made us all familiar with the nervous anxiousness of the Puritan personality, and we have an actual historical example in Robert Keayne, the New England merchant who, to his "shame" and "amazement" was brought before the general court in Boston in 1639 for charging unjust prices for goods imported from London and for making thereby excessive profits in his business. Keayne is Hill's selective hearer brought to book, and in his last will and testament we have Keayne's 50,000 word attempt to prove that, despite appearances, his practices were congruent with Puritan theory and that he was a righteous, if wronged, man. As Bernard Bailyn comments, "To be both a pious Puritan and a successful merchant meant to live under what would seem to have been insupportable pressures."17

There is a third possibility, and that is that some Londoners may have heard the Puritan message in its fullness, have accepted its strictures regarding the temptations and dangers of economic enterprise, and have perceived no contradiction between the values preached and their business practices, because what was in fact preached was supportive of, rather than at variance with, their way of life. Now all three possibilities-the selective hearer, the anxious auditor, and the comfortable and comforted listener-may all have existed at the same time. These alternatives are distinct but not incompatible or contradictory. In all probability many members of the merchant community, who were most exposed to the temptations of wealth, must have alternated among the three possibilities, believing themselves justified in what were in many cases largely tradi-

15 Ibid., pp. 229,230. 16 Ibid., p. 230. 17 New England Merchants, pp. 40-44; see also The Apologia of Robert Keayne,

Bernard Bailyn, ed. (New York, 1965). For Puritan anxiousness, see Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), passim.

38




tional business practices.18 For all that they may have experienced occa- sional bouts of anxiety over particular incidents of sharp practice, they found, on the whole, comfort in a ministry that praised their responsible stewardship and their generosity toward their poor neighbors. Dying, they were convinced, like Alderman Lamot, that "having been by Trades a Merchant, what by God's blessing I have advanced, I have endeavoured and laboured to gain it honestly, and to keep faith, and a good conscience always, even acknowledging that these Parties had a share in my Estate, as in all other men's, viz. the Commonwealth, the service of God, the Ministry, and the poor Members [of] Christ, of whom ... I have endeavoured to be careful ... and to give, with the Relief, a comfortable word, when occasion permits."'9 It is, however, the business ethics, not of the merchants, but of the artisans, to which this essay is addressed, not because the latter are intrinsically more interesting than the former, but rather because evidence exists for the attitudes of at least one London Puritan artisan in the surviving papers of Nehemiah Wallington.

Wallington was born in May 1598 in his father's house on the corner of Pudding Lane and Little Eastcheap in the parish of St. Leonard's East- cheap, and, having never left the parish, Nehemiah died there sixty years later in the late summer of 1658. Nehemiah was the tenth child and the fourth son of John and Elizabeth Wallington. Like his father and elder brother John, Nehemiah became a turner, an artisan who used a wood lathe to produce wooden bowls and trenchers, stools and chairs, which were sold with similar wares from the ground floor shop. Again, like his brother John, he learned the trade from his father, one of the leading members of the Turners Company, and was admitted free of the company by patrimony on May 18, 1620, on payment of a silver spoon.20 A year earlier, Nehemiah had married Grace Rampain, whose older brother, Livewell, a Puritan minister with a Lincolnshire living, wrote his pious brother-in-law comforting letters on the occasion of the death of Walling- ton's first child in 1625.21 Nehemiah and Grace had five children between 1622 and 1630, only one of whom, Sarah, survived childhood; she in turn married in 1647 a young turner, Jonathan Houghton, resident in St. Leonard's Eastcheap, and they in turn produced a son and daughter, Nehemiah's only grandchildren. Houghton was to inherit Wallington's papers on the latter's death in 1658, and it is apparently to his familial

18 It is a mistake to suppose that all merchants were aggressive entrepreneurs; see, for example, Robert Brenner's observation that "most of the Merchant Adven- turers appear to have lost any interest they had in commercial innovation" in the latter half of the sixteenth century. "The Civil War Politics of London's Merchant Community," Past and Present, no. 58 (1973), p. 57.

19 Samuel Clarke, The Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons in this Later Age (Lon- don, 1683), Part II, p. 104.

20 Guildhall Library MS. [henceforth GLMS] 3302/1, Turners Company Book of Apprenticeship Bindings and Admissions, entry dated 20 May 1620.

21 British Library, Sloane MS. 922, fo.71r-74r.

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piety and that of his and Sarah's children that we owe the preservation of these papers.22 Although Nehemiah's father was a prominent member of the Turners Company and was named by King James to the wardenship in the first company charter in 1604, Nehemiah was never either prominent or successful and declined to enter the livery of the company in 1640, apparently on the grounds that he lacked sufficient means.23 If, however, Nehemiah was not particularly successful as a turner, he was exception- ally prolific as a writer, and it is his writings that repay a careful examination.

On the morrow of his marriage to Grace, Nehemiah had drawn up a series of articles "for the reformation" of his life, and these were subse- quently incorporated into a journal to which he gave the title, "A record of the Mercies of God; or a thankful Remembrance," and which he seems to have begun in 1632 and largely completed within that decade.24 In the early 1630s, he began another journal, the "Historical Notes and Medita- tions," a volume of 281 folios; and a third on the "many heavy judgments of God ... upon Sabbath breakers and on Drunkards," a volume of 107 folios.25 In the early 1640s, he began a fourth journal, which he called "The Growth of a Christian," a volume of 190 folios; and in 1650 he wrote a letter book of 209 folios.26 In all, some 2,000 pages survived, covered in his small, neat hand, all written in the course of about twenty years. Doubtless had he plied his trade as vigorously as he had his pen, he would have died a richer man, but his gain would have been our loss, for he has left us the best documented life of a London artisan in the early modern period.27

"Best documented" is, of course, a relative term, and one of the major surprises is the absence among so much manuscript of any household or business accounts or in fact any evidence that such accounts ever existed. On Sunday, August 1, 1641, after Wallington had been an independent shopkeeper for more than a score of years, he noted that his house had been broken into by thieves while he and the family were at church. It is evident from his comment on the incident that he had only a general sense of the size of his losses: "they had taken out, as I think, about three pounds and a box (written on: this is the poor's box) with, as I think, about twenty

22 GLMS 17,607, Parish Register of St. Leonard's Eastcheap, 1538-1752,passim. 23 GLMS 3800, Turner Company Charter of 1604, p.11; GLMS 3295/2, Court

Minutes of the Turners Company, 1633-1688, entry dated 30 July 1640. 24 GLMS 204. The volume has 517 numbered pages. 25 British Library, Additional MS. 21,935 and Sloane MS. 1457. 26 British Library, Additional MS. 40,883 and Sloane MS. 922. 27 In what amounts to a last will and testament, which Wallington appended to

the end of the volume on "The Mercies of God," he regrets leaving "but very little or no portion of worldly riches," but leaves instead as "all my will ... such precepts as myself have received of the Lord (which I have recorded ... in this book)" GLMS 204, pp. 506-07. His writings must have been a major part of his estate, which passed on his death to his son-in-law, Jonathan Houghton, whose signature appears in each volume, dated September 9, 1658. The spelling and punctuation of this and all subsequent quotations have been modernized.

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shillings in it." Further reflection did not suggest that a prudent citizen should take better care of his slender gains but rather the happy thought that he "had not lost more," which in turn led to further self-examination: "how have I gained this money, whether I have not robbed others by lying and deceit."28

If Wallington had only a general notion of how much money he had in his house and shop at any given moment, he had an even less precise idea about the general profitability of his trade.29 A decade before the robbery, he had discovered that his journeyman had systematically looted the business, stealing more than one hundred pounds over a period of two years and reducing Wallington to the border of bankruptcy. What is astonishing about the incident is that neither Wallington "nor divers others could tell how" he came to be in such straits, despite "good trading," until the journeyman, who had furnished a house and supported a wife and child without any discernible source of income, suddenly set up his own shop and sued for his wages for the past two years. Only then did it occur to Wallington that it was the profits of his own business that had been financing his journeyman's household and that had permitted him to set himself up as an independent master. Careful bookkeeping would have revealed the losses long before, but since neither the neighbors nor Wallington's prosperous father suggested such a countermeasure, the keeping of written accounts could not yet have been customary in artisans' households. For Wallington, it was a "great mercy of God" that the journeyman's peculations had come to light at all, and the proper response to such disastrous losses was evidently to "humbly entreat Him of His infinite mercy to bless and sanctify this my poverty unto me for Christ's sake."30

The ethics of getting and spending is not a major preoccupation of Wallington's writings. In a list of New Year's resolutions to which he added annually during the early years of his marriage, Wallington did not express any concern with his livelihood until the forty-seventh article in which he noted "that I take not the least pin nor anything else from anyone and that if I do, then I restore fourfold and [give] one farthing to the poor." He then resolved to put his "trust in God more than in riches, wisdom, strength, or anything else," not to stand "idle at any time nor negligent in my calling," and not to "conceal the faults of my ware, nor speak words of deceit," nor to "take any more for my ware than it is worth ..." Then having made a final resolution not to envy "the prosperity of my neighbors,"

28 GLMS 204, p. 470. 29 On one occasion in the summer of 1642, Wallington paid a creditor 12 shillings,

believing that he had emptied his coffers in doing so, only to discover another 13 or 14 shillings distributed about his various pockets and various drawers in his shop and house. B.L., Add. MS. 40,883, fo.37v. Even on those occasions when Wallington attempted to be specific about his daily receipts, he either gave round numbers or approximations: "... for I did this day [25 June 1643] take almost four pounds, which made me to admire at this great mercy of God, and the next day I took about forty shillings ... His name be praised." Ibid., fo.117v.

30 GLMS., pp. 428-30.

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he turned to more general resolutions, promising that "before I drink one drop of drink or eat a crumb of bread... I lift up my heart to God" and that "I be thankful to God for the least of his blessings." Of the seventy-seven resolutions recorded in the course of a decade, only four were remotely connected to economic activity, and the importance Wallington attached to them can be seen in the relatively trivial monetary fines he imposed on himself when he broke them. Hence, whereas he promised to pay a penny to the use of the poor should he look "after a women to lust after her in my heart," negligence in his calling seemed worthy only of a farthing fine.31 Nevertheless, since his living was precarious at best, his economic difficul- ties did intrude with some regularity on what he clearly deemed to be more important reflections and meditations.32

For all his lack of success, he was not in any ordinary sense a lazy man and had the usual Puritan abhorrence of time wasted. In the late winter of 1642-43, he noted with evident dismay that despite his resolutions made on the sabbath, he had on the following Monday spoken "idly" and delighted in one who did so too, "so misspending my precious time in laughing," when there were clearly other duties to perform: "this sin of mine did grieve me," he wrote in conclusion.33 Hard, regular work was a divine blessing, Wallington thought, not only because it was the chief means by which man was enabled to "glorify God in the place and calling wherein God had set him," but also because work at one's calling was in so many instances the chief antidote to sin. Plagued by a sense of his propensity to succumb to the sins of sloth and spiritual dullness, he saw it as a peculiar mark of "the love and kindness of God in giving me six days [to work] and taking but one for himself." Lust, which he thought a besetting sin of his young manhood, was due to "much solitariness: therefore I set up shop, only thinking that would help me...."34 However, when he "proposed by God's help to make more speed and redeem the time," he was not proposing to work longer hours at his lathe. Rather, he was vexed that he did "oversleep" till "it was past five o'clock" in the morning on a Fast Day, when he had proposed to arise early to go up to his study to pray.35

First Table duties always and necessarily had priority, and good Puritan that he was, his First Table duties required frequent attendance at ser-

31 Ibid., pp. 39-41. The fines may not, of course, be a fair measure of Wallington's value system, but rather testimony to his sense of which values required the strongest sanctions. Feelings of lust apparently troubled him during the early years of his marriage, whereas, presumably, he was well aware of the fact that if he did not pursue his calling he and his family would starve. (By 1622 he and his wife had ceased to live in his father's house and had set up housekeeping several doors away, ibid., p. 38.)

32 For example, on April 20, 1641, Wallington recorded that he "should have been at a fast, but I was very backward.... I had many excuses, how it was a drying day and wife would a forth a drying. And I had great want of money, which moved me to be more diligent .. ." B.L., Add. MS. 40,883, fo.6v.

33 Ibid., fo.69r. 34 B.L., Sloane MS. 922, fo.102v; GLMS 204, pp. 21, 16. 35 B.L., Add. MS. 40,883, fo.75v.

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mons: on one occasion he noted that he had attended nineteen lectures in one week, although he was not sure that he was any better than "a proud pharisee" for so doing.36 Like all scrupulous moralists, the real problem lay in a conflict of priorities, for, although early in his married life he had promised, as has been seen, that he would "not stand idle... nor negligent in my calling,"37 circumstances forced him to recognize that his particular calling might at times conflict with his general. Hence, he notes that on Friday, July 22, 1642, he had intended to hear John Goodwin preach, but considered that if he did, "I must be all that afternoon out of my shop, which I must and ought to attend," and having excused his laziness, as he thought, by invoking the needs of his calling, he decided to "tarry at home." God, of course, saw through his rationalization and caused him to drop a heavy pail, which cut his shin. Wallington concluded his description of the episode with the rueful comment: "I dare say my sin troubled me more than the punishment."38

In general, Wallington did not question that "the chief care of a child of God is and must be still to glorify God in the place and calling wherein God hath set him"; if he wished to prosper in his trade and calling, he should first "seek the Lord" before setting to work, and "his heart upon his God, then is his business like to prosper."39 Although diligence and persistence in the exercise of one's calling were a prerequisite of prosperity, prosperity was not a necessary consequence of persistence and hard work. On the contrary, Wallington was all too aware that prosperity was frequently purchased by other means: "many fear not to lie, deceive, and to use divers such like things ... only to purchase the outward means unto themselves. ... Others think that they cannot [succeed] in this wicked and crooked generation ... unless they cozen, falsify wares, break God's sabbath. Is the Lord become so weak that his children should not be helped, but by such devilish practices? God forbid!" says Wallington. "Tis nothing but our weakness and unbelief that causeth us so to think."40 Hence riches are not necessarily a sign of God's approval and "poverty is no token of God's displeasure . .. for, as it is no argument that the Lord loves a wicked man because he is rich, so it is no argument that God rejects the godly because they are poor."41

The point of a calling was not to gain riches, but to be profitable and useful to oneself, one's family, church, and commonwealth. Wealth, if it came, came not as a reward but as an obligation: "We are stewards and have nothing but that we have received; we came naked into the world, and we must so again return shortly, [when] we must give account of our stewardship."42 It was the obligation of the rich to relieve their "poor

36 GLMS. 204, pp. 48-49. 37 Ibid., p. 40. 38 B.L., Add. MS. 40,883, fo.27v. 39 B.L., Sloane MS. 922, fos.103r; GLMS 204, p. 341. 40 GLMS 204, pp. 445-46. 4 Ibid., p. 334. 42 Ibid., pp. 55, 109.

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brethren" either in time of dearth or of their poverty. Hospitality and neighborliness may have been vanishing virtues in seventeenth-century England, but the demise of these traditional obligations was not due to Puritan individualism. "Let us show that we have not forsaken the fear of God.... Let us refresh our brethren and not be ashamed of their poverty. ... If we were poor, we would think it the rich man's duty to relieve us: the royal law is to do as we would be done by; this is the law of God, the law of Nature, the law of Nations; it is equity to do it; it is iniquity to omit it."43

Riches not only carried an obligation to use them well, but all too often, Wallington feared, riches were not a reward for honest labor but a consequence of sharp practice, of "lying and oppression," of"cruelty and unmercifulness to the poor."44 "I have often thought," wrote Wallington, "why the Lord should restrain ... those outward things from me, He being a loving, kind, and merciful father," and concluded that God did so "to conform me to my Saviour, Christ Jesus, and his Apostles which were... but poor men."45 Admittedly, it was true that, just as the rich were subject to the sins of "misgetting, miskeeping, misspending," so the poor were prone to "envy" and "grumbling," but on the whole Wallington preferred the temptations of the poor to those of the rich.46 Poverty was not to be sought, but if poverty came, despite diligent labor, it should not be a source of dismay. If God brings his children into necessity, "it is but for the trial of their faith.. .: if He cast them into the fire, it is not to consume them but to purge them and refine them. ... Afflictions are their schooling, and adversity their best university...."47

These values and attitudes are not medieval, but neither did they aid and abet the entrepreneurial spirit. Poverty is not to be sought, and voluntary poverty is never praised as a Christian virtue. No legitimate calling is better than another, and all Christians are commanded to "believe always your estate to be the work of God and vary not therein."48 On the other hand, successful enterprise seemed all too often to depend on "lying, deceit, oppression, bribery, usury, false weights, false measures, or ... like iniquity," a hazard to one's eternal soul for the sake of vainglorious and temporary show, for "all naughty gain will have a naughty end."49 If Wallington was suspicious of success, he alternated between attributing his bouts of poverty to his own "idleness and negligence" in his calling and God's attempt to wean him from an inordinate love of the world.50 In any event, he was confident that God would not ultimately forsake his own,

43 Ibid., p. 108. 44 B.L., Sloane MS. 922, fos. 175v, 169v. 45 GLMS 204, p. 440. 46 Ibid., p. 479; B.L., Sloane MS. 922, fo. 175v. 47 GLMS 204, p. 454; Wallington is here quoting without attribution from Arthur

Dent, The Plaine Mans Path-Way to Heaven (London, 1601), p. 123. 48 B.L., Sloane MS. 922, fo.32r; Wallington is here quoting from a letter by

Richard Greenham, dated 1612. 49 GLMS 204, pp. 12,487. 50 Ibid., p. 452.

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and there is no reason to suppose that his confidence was misplaced. He knew he was reputed "to be a very honest plain-dealing man"; over the years he found evidence of "God's providence towards my soul and body...."5.15 If he never approached the success of his brother or father, he nevertheless paid his tithes and taxes, served thrice on the grand jury of his ward, attended for a decade the meetings of the Fourth London classis, and died full of years, a respected member of his parish and of the local Puritan community.52

Finally, if Wallington's values and attitudes neither preserved the past nor anticipated the future, they nevertheless were quite appropriate to the economic ambience of the small London master. Like most guilds, the turners sought to limit competition. Masters were to have only one apprentice at a time; liverymen might take on a second apprentice with the permission of the company's master, wardens, and assistants and on payment of a fine of five pounds, a substantial sum. The twenty-four assistants and the wardens might take on two apprentices, but a third only with the permission of the court and on payment of a two-pound fine. Apprenticeships were to last seven years, journeymen were to serve two years, and all shops were to be inspected quarterly and shoddy goods confiscated. No turner was to contract for cheap goods produced elsewhere, unless the goods could not be produced by the London community. The number of booths that could be set up at the great London fairs was regulated by the company, as was the length of time any turner might keep his booth open for the sale of wares. No shop could employ more than one journeyman, and no turner could open more than one shop.53 These and other ordinances, most of which were aimed at preserving the noncompeti- tive world of the small master, were enforced throughout Wallington's lifetime, as the court minutes of the company amply testify.54 In addition, the constant awareness of how one's neighbor was prospering and what his shop was charging tended further to inhibit price competition.55

IfWallington's experience is typical, another factor besides formal regulation and informal suasion limited competition and promoted communal solidarity, and that was the constant need for credit. Despite Wallington's repeated anxieties about his lack of money, he seems to have had what we would call a "cash-flow" problem rather than a lack of paying customers.

51 B.L., Add. MS. 40,883, fos.5r, 187r. 52 For Wallington's service on the grand jury, see GLMS 3461/1, Bridge Ward

Within: Wardmote Inquests, etc., under dates 1644,1645,1655. Forhis participation as a member of the Fourth London Classis, see The Register-Booke of the Fourth Classis in the Province ofLondon 1646-59, transcribed and introduced by Charles E. Surman. Harleian Soc. Pub., vols. 42-43 (London, 1953), pp. 3-124.

53 GLMS 3308, Turners Company Ordinances, 6 James I, 1608, passim. 54 See GLMS 3295/1, 3295/2. 55 On August 21, 1641 Wallington notes that his neighbor "took as many pounds

as I took shillings," and a few days later he notes that his apprentice and a neighbor talked him into lowering his prices, he feared below his costs. B.L., Add. MS. 40,883, fos. 8v, 9r; see also fo. 166r.

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At any given time much of his capital was tied up in wood to be worked and in his stock of wares. Moreover, he sold other wares that he purchased from chapmen for cash, and it was these transactions in particular that led to periodic crises in his finances and to his resort to his neighbors and kin for short-term loans. Early in Wallington's career his father arranged a three-year interest free loan of fifteen pounds from the Turners Company loan fund, but all other credit transactions seem to have been for smaller sums. For example, in June 1643 he experienced a crisis when a creditor asked for immediate payment of six pounds owed on a loan of ten pounds; in early September he borrowed five pounds from a godly widow about to embark for New England; and in December he had the mortifying experience of having to borrow two pounds from brother John who accompanied the loan "with some tart words." "Praised be my God," Wallington wrote, "within two days I paid it him again."56 It is not perhaps very surprising that in such a neighborly world of financial interdependence cut-throat competitiveness was not regarded as a sign of virtue.

Finally, it is evident that consciousness of being numbered among the godly, of being a member of the Puritan community, inhibited sharp practice and profiteering. As Paul Baynes wrote in a letter Wallington copied into his letter book, "The communion of the saints must be a point of practice, as well as an article of belief."57 Although Baynes did not mention the fact, Wallington knew from experience that the practice of the saint reflected upon the whole community. Apparently some customers regularly sought out Puritan tradesmen, drawn by their reputed honesty.58 On one such occasion in May 1641 a gentlewoman had purchased some wooden trenchers from Wallington's shop and had been assured by Wallington's apprentice that they were made of maple, when in fact they were made of aspen. At her departure from the shop the neighbor's apprentice told her that she had been cozened, and on the following day she returned and confronted Wallington with the evidence of deceit. Wallington was clearly embarrassed, but what evidently cut the deepest was her remark that "I partly know you for an honest man and that you have lived under a faithful minister a long time"; for such a person "to lie and cozen" was, she said, "to bring a slander on religion." Wallington accepted the charge, returned the purchase price, but confessed that, as for the wrong his apprentice had done, he could "no way help it." He recorded in his journal, however, that "it is a detestable thing to me, and it goes to my heart to think of it," for, as he knew, it "opens the mouths of the wicked to say: 'These Puritans! they will not swear, but they will lie and cozen!'"59

Just after New Year's Day in 1650, Henry Roborough was buried at St.

56 GLMS 3295/1, 19 January 1625/6; B.L., Add. MS., 40,883, fos. 112v, 144v, 179v.

57 B.L., Sloane MS.922, fo.56r. 58 Wallington notes that one of his customers was reputed to be one who "always

goes to these Puritans." B.L., Add. MS. 40,883, fo.9r. 59 Ibid., fos.7r-v.

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Leonard's Eastcheap; a contemporary of Wallington's, he had been minister and lecturer in the parish at least since 1620.60 In March, Matthew Barker, a score of years younger than Wallington and, unlike Roborough, a prominent Independent, was placed in the vicarage.6l Within a month, Wallington was writing in complaint, not of Barker's independency, but because "I fear some may sleep and lie snorting in their sins for many years and scarce be awakened by so sweet preaching as yours is. ..."62 For Wallington, the failure to create a godly discipline, the failure to bring about moral reformation was by 1650 both a scandal and almost past understanding, a reproach both to the church and state, for in the face of obvious sins on every hand "neither the sword of the magistracy nor ministry [was] pulled out against them." Since obviously the gravity of the situation was not as manifest to Barker as it was to Wallington, the latter catalogued the various unchecked vices-"profaning of the Lord's day, drunkenness, whoredom, the swearing and blaspheming, the errors and schisms," but also "the covetousness, the oppression, the cruelty and unmercifulness to the poor."63 But however much Wallington might decry the failure of godly reformation in practice, there is no evidence that he and the Puritan ministers, whether Presbyterians like Roborough or Independents like Barker, differed in their understanding of its substance.

The social ethics of the Puritans of Wallington's generation may have been bourgeois, but they were nonetheless the bourgeois values appropriate to the artisan households and small masters of Wallington's stripe, not to the enterprising merchant interlopers clamoring for free trade, nor to the small circle of City financiers who farmed the customs and enjoyed the privileges of crown creditors.?' Questions about the nature of legitimate

60 GLMS 17,607, fos.25r, 20r; Lambeth Palace Library MS. 942, no. 14, for his lectureship at St. Leonard's and at neighboring St. Clement's; see also Benjamin Brook, Lives of the Puritans (London, 1813), III, 531-32; John and J.A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, Part I, From Earliest Times to 1751 (Cambridge, 1922), iii, 476. Abraham Colfe, rector of St. Leonard's, was also vicar of St. Mary's, Lewisham, Kent, where he was resident, hence, although Roborough's only title was to the lectureship, he was de facto minister of the parish.

61 A.G. Matthews, Calamy Revised (Oxford, 1934), pp. 28-29. 62 B.L., Sloane MS. 922, fo.169r. 63 Ibid., fos. 169r-v. 64 It is, of course, notoriously difficult to be precise about what level of income or

wealth such terms imply. The survey conducted in 1638 for the "Settlement of Tithes" shows Wallington's house as having a rental value of 20 pounds per annum at the "moderated" rent (i.e., 75 percent of actual market value); his brother John's at 24 pounds; whereas Alderman Gurney's house in St. Vedast was valued at 70 pounds; Alderman Andrewes' at 60 pounds; Alderman Backhouse's at 60 pounds; Alderman Cordwell's at 40 pounds; Alderman Highlord's at 30 pounds; Alderman Pratt's at 60 pounds; Alderman Soames' at 70 pounds and Sheriff Atkins' at 80 pounds. On the other hand Wallington's house was one of the better in the parish: only 26 percent of the houses in the parish were assessed at a higher rent. The average rental assessed for St. Leonard's Eastcheap in 1638 was 17 pounds; of the six surrounding parishes, St. Michael Crooked Lane had an average of only 11 pounds, St. Mary New Fish Street of 13 pounds, St. Andrew Hubbard of 14 pounds, St. Clement Eastcheap of 20 pounds, St. George Botolph Lane of 25 pounds, and St. Benet Gracechurch Street of 27 pounds.

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contracts, interest, and prices might lead the Puritan casuists into all sorts of subtle distinctions, but in the main even their message was clear and unambiguous.65 Central to all discussions of economic ethics was the concept of the common wealth in which God is glorified by "everyone ... helping others in some particular calling."66 As Perkins, put it, "The common good of man stands in this; not only that they live, but that they live well, in righteousness and holiness and consequently in true happiness. And for the attainment hereunto God hath ordained and disposed all callings, and in his providence designed the persons to bear them."67 Hence, economic enterprise was never seen as an end in itself. As Arthur Dent wrote in his Plaine Mans Path-Way to Heaven, a work from which Wallington quoted extensively, "no man can serve two masters, both God and riches."68

Dent's Plaine Mans Path-Way to Heaven is interesting not only because Wallington evidently read it with approval, but also, and more importantly, because it is so difficult to discern any kind of"class" bias in the analysis it presents. Dent does not discuss wealth or entrepreneurial attitudes in isolation; rather, getting and spending are dealt with piecemeal in the course of a lengthy analysis of the sins of covetousness and idleness, two of the "nine manifest signs of damnation."69 It is behavior and attitude, not social position and condition, that condemns the wicked and defines the good. Hence, while Dent can describe a "good rich man" as one who "keepth a good house, relieveth the poor, ministreth to the necessities of the Saints, and giveth cheerfully and with discretion where need is," he also recognizes the existence of the good poor, those who are "humble, lowly, dutiful, painful, ready to help and ready to please."70 Rich and poor, everyone is exhorted to labor in his calling and to keep his station in life. However, Dent, like Wallington, does not assume that such labor will necessarily be rewarded, at least here on earth: "God will not give us too much ease and prosperity in this world, for he knoweth it will poison us."71

It is not riches or poverty as such, but appetite that Dent condemns. The good rich man and the good poor man both must pursue their callings in order to provide for the legitimate needs of themselves and their families and neighbors. Dent was not suspicious of riches per se: lords, gentlemen, and merchants were rich because their ranks and callings by definition necessarily involved great wealth. Like most moralists of his generation,

65 For examples of the casuists' art, see William Perkins, "Epieikeia" in The Work of William Perkins, Ian Breward, ed. (Abingdon, Berks., 1970), 489-91, and William Ames, Conscience with the Power of Cases There of (n.p., 1639), Bk.4, chapter 42, "Of Contracts."

66 Ames, Conscience, Bk.4, p. 248. 67 Works, ed. Breward, p. 449. 68 (London, 1601), p. 99. Wallington incorporated substantial portions of the

Plaine Mans Path-Way, pp. 122-29, into his journal, "The Mercies of God," GLMS 204, pp. 453-56.

69 Dent, Plaine Mans Path-Way, p. 35. 70 Ibid., p. 197. 71 Ibid., pp. 125-26.

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what worried Dent was not wealth but the pursuit of riches as an end in itself. "An eager and sharp-set desire of getting" is a sign of covetousness; it is not riches but the desire to gain riches "in all haste, by hook or by crook" that is destructive.72 And the destruction is as universal as the appetite. Unchecked greed is an evil, not because the newly rich are necessarily uncharitable or their offspring invariably lazy and idle, but because for rich or poor alike greed perverts all just relationships: "it marreth marriages" as well as "alms-deeds," and it "woundeth our farm- ers" as well as "our gentlemen."73 Greed is the universal solvent, finally destroying "any sound comfort in God, for no man can serve two masters."74

Arthur Dent, "preacher of the word of God," viewed the world from the vantage point of South Shoebury in southeastern Essex. If it is still a traditional rural world, it is nonetheless a busy one where "God allows none to live idlely, but all, both great and small are to be employed one way or another, either for the benefit of the Church or Commonwealth, or for the good government of their own households ... or for the succor of the poor, or for the furtherance of the Gospel ... or for one good use or another."75 Not surprisingly, the book is dedicated to Sir Julius Caesar, that busy civilian and crown servant. Although it is not Wallington's world, it has at least one quality in common, for Dent's rural commonwealth, like Wallington's urban world of small artisan masters, was threatened by unrestrained economic appetite and entrepreneurial energy.

Similar guides exist for the perplexed "plain man," written from an urban perspective, but the values that inform such guides do not seem radically different. In 1613, Robert Hill, D.D., published The Pathway to Prayer and Pietie containing, among other things, "A Direction to a Christian Life," and dedicated to Lord Ellesmere, who had preferred Hill to the lectureship at St. Martin-in-the-Fields and to the rectory of St. Margaret Moses in the City. Like Dent's rural world, Hill's urban one is organized by distinct ranks and orders. In considering what clothes are appropriate, Hill argues that one must consider the ends for which clothing is worn, one of which is "for distinction, both of men from women, young from old, magistrates from subjects, the clergy from the laity, and the rich from the poor." In particular, one "must not look so much what I am able to do, as what is fit for me to be done, to imitate the most grave and sober sort of my rank, and to keep myself rather under, than above my degree."76

72 Ibid., pp. 77, 81. 73Ibid., pp. 80-81. 4 Ibid., p. 99. 5 Ibid., p. 192.

76 Robert Hill, ThePathway toPrayerandPietie (London, 1613), Part 3, pp. 77-78. To these distinctions, the Turners Company would have added those that distin- guished the properly modest apprentice and the properly dignified master. As late as 1631, the company still insisted that the apprentice wear doublets, jerkins, and cloaks made of leather, fustian, or cloth and have their hair "round cut" without long locks. However, the apparel strictly forbidden suggests the actual practice of at least some fashionable young Turners, for they were warned not to wear any lace or silk or to use gold buttons. GLMS 3295/1, Court Minutes of the Turners Company,

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Again like Dent, Hill insists that "even gallant and great ones have a calling," for so "all godly men had."77 However, some of Hill's strictures suggest quite plainly the ambience ofthe struggling small master, familiar enough with poverty to have some sympathy for the poor, depending on cheap credit and so fearing the usurous lender, hoping at best for what Hill calls "Christian frugality." The first rule to be observed is that one's "calling be in truth an 'honest' one, as that I be not ashamed of the very name thereof, as usurers are to be called usurers." Hill is quite specific about what honest labor entails. It is, of course, to be pursued with diligence, but also without fraud and with honest weights and wares. One is not to enrich oneself "by the labour of the poor," but rather to show "mercifulness and friendly dealing with the poor in buying of them their commodities, selling to them their wares, and labouring for them to their good. This is a good way to thrive." One is neither to forswear oneself in trading nor to commend one's "servants for deceiving any." The ideal is an honest householder's ideal: to give to the poor without reproaching them, to have a regard for one's kindred, and "especially" to be in a position to "give to the godly." A "Christian frugality" is not incompatible with a "thriving frugality," but the assumption is that a modest liberality and a modest prosperity are best. What is utterly condemned is the parasitic existence "of such as live only upon other men's purses and paines, devour- ing the good creatures of God, and living upon the spoil of others," for such people are truly "a burden to the earth, a bane of the commonwealth, and the worst creatures in the world."78

Civil honesty and hard work may reasonably lead to a moderate prosperity, but Hill never forgets the propensity, even of the godly, to sin: "The pampering of our bellies, the pride of our apparel, the negligence in our calling, the misspending of our time, our vain conference at table, our wandering eyes, our wanton lusts, our ambitious minds, our covetous desires, our ungodly speeches, our lascivious ears, our censuring of our brethren, our sin in recreations, our unwillingness to labour, our unfaith- fulness in life, our forgetfulness in death, and our abuse of thy mercies, especially in Christ, do testify against us...."79 Inner sins are matched by outer calamities: life for the godly is a constant battle against the temptations of the one and the despair induced by the other. "The Life of Chris- tians," as Hill reiterated over and over again, "must be a warfare upon earth."80

1605-33, under date of 3 February 1630/31. The revolutionary 1640s saw some slackening of standards. After repeated orders in the 1630s against masters who wore falling bands rather than the more sober ruff bands, an order of October 22, 1645, conceded "that for time to come the wearing of ruff or falling bands shall be left wholly to the discretion of each member of this Company ..." GLMS 3295/2 under that date.

77 The Pathway to Prayer and Pietie, Part 3, pp. 81-82. 78 Ibid., pp. 78-83. 79 Ibid., p. 254. 80 Ibid., p. 239.

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Wallington's writings testify to the incessant warfare that was the lot of the Christian on this earth, but there is little evidence that he perceived any change in the nature of the battle in the course of his long life. The forces of a market economy may have been gaining at the expense of the old regulated monopolies of the City guilds and companies, but, if so, Wallington was not aware of the fact, nor is there any reason why he should have been. Obviously guild regulation could not protect the small master from all the effects of the market; when trade was dead, the artisans suffered along with the rest of the urban population. Nevertheless, there is no evidence that guild practice had changed in any substantial way from the time of John Wallington, senior, to that of his son Nehemiah. In 1637 the company loaned fifteen pounds from the Slutter fund to Nehemiah, and in the same year fined him five pounds for taking a second

apprentice.8' In 1645, in the midst of all the turmoil of that troubled year, the company's wardens and assistants conducted their customary inspec- tion of members' shops, and three chairs, judged "deceitfully made," were taken from Wallington's shop.82

There is no evidence that Wallington continued to buy books as late as the last year of his life, but if he had, he would have found in John Ball's posthumously published The Power of Godliness a work as reinforcing of his values as the works of Hill and Dent published half a century earlier. Particular callings are to be pursued with "diligence, faithfulness, and painfulness." The "outward comforts of this life" are to be used with "frugality and moderation," lest we be "oppressed with surfeiting and voluptuousness, and the cares of the world," for if sanctified to our use, these "outward comforts" will not "draw our hearts away from God." Wealth should be appropriate to status: "a nobleman hath need of a large allowance to maintain him according to his nobility...." It is proper to pray for "all things needful to the maintenance and comfort of this life," but it is also necessary to pray for "contentation with our estate, though it be mean," for the providence of God is ultimately unsearchable. We may legitimately pray for relief from "beggary and extreme want," but poverty is of itself no more a sign of reprobation than worldly success is of election: "If we be in Christ, and yet poor, having in a manner nothing, we pray that God out of his secret love would minister to us, and make the fruit of his daily providence a contented portion unto us, be it never so little."83 Christians must both pray for their daily bread and labor for it "by just and honest means." Further, those "things well and honestly gotten" must also be "wisely and justly" used. Finally, wealth exists for the common good; "God hath made us stewards of his blessings to be disposed to the glory of his name, and comfort of our brethren .... The good things which we have begotten by our honest labour, through favour of God, are not our own

81 GLMS 3297/1, Wardens Account Book, 1593-1670, under the year 1637-38. 82 GLMS 3295/2, Turners Company Court Minute Book, entry for 9 October

1645. 83 (London, 1657), pp. 446-48, 452.

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wholly; our poor brethren must share with us therein... ."84 It may be true, as C.H. George has argued, that "from the publication in 1659 of March- amont Nedham's Interest Will NotLie, ora View ofEngland's TrueInterest, to Pope's 'That Reason, Passion answer one great aim / That true Self-Love and Social are the same," the written record of England's completed bourgeois revolution becomes overwhelming."85 Nevertheless, that new world in which unrestrained appetite and ego could be thought to work for the common good seems totally alien both to the social world of the London artisan and to the mental world of the Puritan householder. At least in Wallington's lifetime, Puritan precept and artisan practice seemed to go hand in hand.

Such evidence as Wallington provides may be a slender foundation on which to base any large conclusions. Nevertheless, the evidence is obviously suggestive. The entrepreneurial merchant, as Christopher Hill suggests, may have listened to Puritan sermons with a selective ear and an even more selective memory;86 he may have viewed his success with anxiety and have endowed almshouses, schools, and lectureships as reassuring evidence of good stewardship. But for the great mass of honest householders who filled the City churches no such conflict could have existed. Diligence in their calling was the price of survival, and in a world in which one of Wallington's apprentices was the son of a Suffolk mercer, the next of a Birmingham panner, a third of a Surrey brewer, and a fourth of a Norfolk yeoman, the doctrine of the equality of all honest callings must have seemed self-evident truth.87 Honest dealing and adherence to a non- competitive, just price must have been a necessity in a trade supervised by one's company and scrutinized by one's neighbors. When trade was bad, as it was in the early 1630s and again in the early 1640s, it must have been reassuring to know that God afflicts the saints for their own good, and that God does not ultimately desert His own. On a dark December sabbath in 1643, Wallington was comforted by a sermon on Hebrews X:36 "Now the Just shall live by faith," and recorded the thought that "if a man have faith in God, though he be poor and tottered, yet that he hath from God yields most comfort and sweetness. If a man have inward peace and comfort, his conscience is sprinkled by the blood of Christ. .. ."88

For the genuine entrepreneur, for the merchant on the make, the inward peace that Wallington sought despite his straightened circumstances may have seemed at best an irrelevancy, at worst cold comfort indeed. But for

84 Ibid., pp. 456-57. 85 "The Making of the English Bourgeoisie," Science and Society, xxxv(1971):409. 86 On the whole, sermons tended to treat economic ethics in rather simple terms.

Technical works of casuistry, such as those by Perkins and Ames, were not as obviously written for a popular lay audience as such works as Dent's Plaine Mans Path-Way, and it may be that most laymen were not aware of such moral loopholes as the casuists allowed them.

87 For the social origins of the nine apprentices who served Wallington in the course of his career as a master turner, see GLMS 3302/1, passim.

88 B.L., Add. MS. 40,883, fo. 178r.

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THE PURITAN WORK ETHIC REVISITED 53

the vast majority of artisans and tradesmen, whose ambitions were bounded by guild, parish, and ward, and who sought no more than the respect due to the honest and independent householder, the sermons that spoke to Wallington's condition must have answered the needs of many more. If the social ethic preached and published by Puritan divines in Wallington's lifetime was more akin to that of their medieval predecessors than to that of Bernard Mandeville or Benjamin Franklin a century later, it may be because the world viewed from the pulpit seemed largely un- changed, and the traditional social ethics still relevant to the traditional economy and society of small master craftsmen and shopkeepers. Our mistake has been to assume that what the Puritan urban laity wanted was the sanctification of entrepreneurial energy and profits; it seems more likely that most Puritans sought assurance that a good conscience in hard times was blessing enough.

STANFORD UNIVERSITY



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The Puritan Work Ethic Revisited