awfully get more than in another way, if you
refuse this and choose the less gainful way, you cross one of the ends of
your calling, and you refuse to be God's steward."

It would be instructive and delightful to follow the controversy caused
by Weber's thesis. Some scholars, like Knodt, denied its validity,
tracing capitalism back of the spirit of Fugger rather than of Calvin;
but most accepted it. Fine interpretations and criticisms of it were
offered by Cunningham, Brentano, Kovalewsky and Ashley. So commonly has
it been received that it has finally been summed up in a brilliant but
superficial epigram used by Chesterton, good enough to have been coined
by him--though it is not, I believe, from his mint--that the Reformation
was "the Revolution of the rich against the poor."

[Sidenote: Darwinism]

Contemporary with the economic historiography, there was a new
intellectual criticism reminding one superficially of the Voltairean, but
in reality founded far more on Darwinian ideas. The older "philosophers"
had blamed the Reformers for not coming up to a modern standard; the new
evolutionists censured {730} them for falling below the standard of their
own age. Moreover, the critique of the new atheism was more searching
than had been that of the old deism.

Until Nietzsche, the prevailing view had been that the Reformation was
the child, or sister, of the Renaissance, and the parent of the
Enlightenment and the French Revolution. "We are in the midst of a
gigantic movement," wrote Huxley, "greater than that which preceded and
produced the Reformation, and really only a continuation of that
movement." "The Reformation," in the opinion of Tolstoy, "was a rude,
incidental reflection of the labor of thought, striving after the
liberation of man from the darkness." "The truth is," according to
Symonds, "that the Reformation was the Teutonic Renaissance. It was the
emancipation of the reason on a line neglected by the Italians, more
important, indeed, in its political consequences, more weighty in its
bearing on rationalistic developments than was the Italian Renaissance,
but none the less an outcome of the same grand influence." William
Dilthey, in the nineties, labored to show that the essence of the
Reformation was the same in the religious fields as that of the best
thought contemporary to it in other lines.

[Sidenote: Nietzsche]

But these ideas were already obsolescent since Friedrich Nietzsche had
wor