The Marxists were right about some things. Sixteenth century Geneva under Calvin was the storm centre of the Bourgoise revolution against the Feudal order, much as Moscow was the gathering point for Communist revolutionaries in the twentieth century. It was certainly not the only factor in the birth of the modern world but it was one of them. Robinson Crusoe is the patron saint of mercantile Puritanism and it is no accident that the cities in which the Reformation took firmest hold – Amsterdam, London, Edinburgh and Glasgow – became centres of early global capitalism.
Eventually this affinity would have consequences for Canada. The Presbyterian Scots who dominated the 19th century Montreal business community and built the C.P.R. conformed to type. As Scottish born George Stephen, who oversaw the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, noted, “any success I may have received in life is due in great measure to the somewhat Spartan training I received as a boy during my Aberdeen apprenticeship, in which I entered as a boy of 15. It was impressed upon me from my earliest years … that I must aim at being a thorough master of the work by which I had to get my living; and that I must concentrate my whole energies on my work, whatever that might be, to the exclusion of every other thing. I soon discovered that if I ever accomplished anything in life it would be by pursuing my object with a persistent determination to attain it. I had neither the training or the talents to accomplish anything without hard work, and fortunately I knew it.”
There was, undoubtedly, a connection between Calvinism and “the Spirit of Capitalism.” An ethic of hard work and frugality tends towards capital accumulation. Combined with a willingness to take entrepreneurial risk in expectation of divine blessing, Calvinism provided a favourable cultural environment for capitalist success. As Pierre Berton tells it in The National Dream: “It was [a] hard ethic, so forcefully expressed … that explains the dominance of the Scot in pioneer Canada … For the Scots it was work, save and study; study, save and work. The Irishmen outnumbered them as they did the English, but the Scots ran the country. Though they formed only one fifteenth of the population they controlled the fur trade, the great banking and financial houses, the major educational institutions, and to a considerable degree, the government.”
The connection between the Calvinist ethos and commercial success is a cliché. Less well known is the other side of the tradition—Calvin’s critique of greed and Capitalist excess. Sixteenth century Geneva was certainly not place of unfettered and socially irresponsible economic speculation. The receiving of interest on investments was permitted, but merchants who engaged in sharp practice were subjected to discipline. Education and hospital care for the poor was provided for free; widows and orphans were tended to by an order of deacons. Interest was not charged on loans to the poor. While laziness was certainly not encouraged or abetted, those who were unable to take care of themselves were not abandoned. Social and economic life in Geneva was organized according to God’s commandments, as revealed by the prophets. Social justice was a human duty, which served to increase the glory of God. No one who heard Calvin expound on “Thou shalt not steal” would accuse him of confusing greed and piety. Calvin took the eighth commandment to mean that, “injustice being an abomination to God, we must render to every man his due….There are many kinds of theft. Though they may be obtained by an action at law, a different decision is given by God. He sees the long train of deception by which the man of craft begins to lay nets for the his more simple neighbour, until he entangles him in its meshes – sees the harsh and cruel laws by which the powerful oppresses and crushes the feeble – sees the enticements by which the more wily baits the hook for the less wary, though all these escape the judgment of man….Everyone who performs not what he owes to others, keeps back or makes away with what does not belong to him [is guilty of theft before God.] Obeying the commandment means that we hasten not to heap up wealth cruelly wrung from the blood of others; [not] by means lawful and unlawful eagerly scraping together whatever may glut our avarice or meet our prodigality, but rather contributing to the relief of those whom we see under the pressure of difficulties; assisting them out of our abundance.”
The “disenchantment of nature” and the rational organization of the economy – key factors in the birth of the modern world – were accompanied by a prophet critique of church and society. Rather than accepting the hierarchically organized Feudal order of society and the “great chain of being”as a divinely ordained, social arrangements were viewed as provisional; constructed by human beings and subject to judgment and reform according to the Word of God. Instead of the King alone being responsible for the maintenance of the social order and the welfare of his subjects, the Saints claimed a large measure of responsibility. When a irritated Mary Queen of Scots protested to John Knox “What are ye within this commonwealth?” he replied, “A subject born within the same, Madam.” Under the influence of Reformed doctrine, subjects became active and vocal citizens, asthe Stuarts discovered to their chagrin. The Puritan minister, Thomas Case, preaching to the English House of Commons on the eve of the Civil War provides a heady sense of the new wine of social reform. “Reformation must be universal…reform all places, all persons and callings; reform the benches of judgment, the inferior mageistrates. …Reform the universities, reform the cities, reform the countries, reform inferior schools of learning, reform the Sabbath, reform the ordinances, the worship of God…you have more work to do than I can speak… Every plant which my heavenly Father hath not planted shall be rooted up.” )
Under the impact of Evangelical revivalism and the individualistic ethic that it fostered, the prophetic strand of Calvinism was suppressed in the 18th and 19th centuries. It became common for rich businessmen and to see their wealth as a sign of God’s favour and to regard the wretched poverty of workers as God’s will. The grossly unequal distribution of this world’s goods could be complacently attributed to the mysterious and predestined purposes of God. For the most part, ministers (whose stipends depended on the contributions of businessmen in the pews) did not see fit to challenge such assumptions. The result was the more or less complete alienation of the industrial working class from church. This is the context of Karl Marx’s jibe about “arch-parson [Thomas] Chalmers” -acknowledged leader of the evangelical party of the early 19th century Church of Scotland. It was left to the 19th century Scottish writer, Thomas Carlyle, to articulate the other side of the Calvinist tradition, the one not trapped in a preoccupation with individual predestination. Carlyle provided Victorian society with a moral vocabulary to protest against the shameless exploitation of the working class and raged against those who ground the faces of the poor.
In Canada, it was an avid student of Carlyle, one who had studied in Glasgow and ministered in the industrial slums of Glasgow who took on the mantle of Calvinist prophet. First as minister of St. Matthew’s church, Halifax (1862 –1877) and then until his death as Principal of Queen’s University in 1902, the Rev. George Monro Grant (great grandfather of Michael Ignatieff) reminded Canadians as Canada began to industrialize of Calvin’s insight. There were numerous ways to engage in theft, some more obvious than others. In a 1892 address in Toronto to the Alliance of Reformed Churches on “The Wage Question” he railed against “Sir Gorgias Midas, or that far nobler Mammon worshiper, Plugson of Undershott” and the fact that “the Church allows the former to sleep in a cushioned pew, and it has actually sung the praises of the latter…This will not do. The church must manage somehow to get better weights and balances, on penalty of having itself weighed and found wanting.”
One of those who may well have been sitting in the pews that day was a young student of Economics and Political Science, W.L. Mackenzie King. A few years later, after one of Grant’s sermons at St. Andrew’s, King Street, when he came to ask for advice on graduate schools; Grant responded by pushing him on whether God was calling him to the ministry of word and sacrament. After a few sleepless nights, King concluded that his piety and ambition pointed in other directions. But it was under the political direction of Mackenzie King and a stream of Queen’s trained civil servants from Presbyterians homes – Adam Shortt, O.D. Skelton, Norman Robertson, Bryce Stewart, Clifford Clark, William Mackintosh and Alex Corry – that “the government generation” in Ottawa tamed the excesses of industrial capitalism in Canada and created the welfare state. .Such residual Calvinist influence remained potent in Canada well into the 20th century. The recent crisis of confidence in the global stock market suggests that its disappearance in North American society may not have been a change for the better.
Mark Valeri, “Religion, Discipline, and the Economy in Calvin’s Geneva,” Sixteenth Century Journal 28, 1 (1997) p. 123-42
Edward Dommen & James D. Bratt eds, John Calvin Reconsidered: The Impact of His Social and Economic Thought (Louisville, 2007) Andre Bieler, Calvin’s Economic and Social Thought (Geneva, 2005)
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book II Chapter 8
Geddes MacGregor, The Thundering Scot, (Philadelphia, 1957) p.195.
Michael Walzer The Revolution of the Saints (Harvard, 1965) p.
The Canadian Presbyterian experience in this respect was different than in Scotland and the United States, in part because Canada industrialized later and churches played a different role in the process. D.B. Mack “Of Canadian Presbyterians and Guardian Angels” in Amazing Grace: Evangelicalism in Australia, Britain, Canada and the United States ed. George A Rawlyk and Mark A Noll (Kingston, 1994) pp. 269- 292
Christopher Lasch The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York, 1991) pp. 226-243
Sir Gorgias Midas – the self important nouveau riche – was one of George Du Maurier’s cartoon figures in Punch; Plugson of Undershott comes from Carlyle’s Past and Present Vol III, Chap 10)
G.M. Grant, “The Wage Question” in Alliance of the Reformed Churches Holding the Presbyterian System: Proceedings of the Fifth General Council, Toronto 1892 (Toronto, 1892) p. 353
W.L.M.King diary, Jan 3, 4, 1897
J.L. Granatstein, Ottawa Men the Civil Service Mandarins 1935-1957 (Toronto,1982); Barry Ferguson, Remaking Liberalism: The Intellectual Legacy of Adam Shortt, O.D. Skelton, W.C. Clark and W.A. Mackintosh 1890 –1925 ( Kingston, 1993)
